Virgin Atlantic Flying Club - How do we use 127,000 FC points to (help) get to New Zealand?

OK - Please can someone help a relative newbie??!

Our son has moved to Wellington, New Zealand :(, and we live near London Heathrow. My wife and I have 127,000 Virgin Atlantic Flying Club miles in my Flying Club account.

1) How can we make best use (i.e. get best value) from these points to part pay for a return trip to New Zealand from LHR? We'd prefer to stop-over on both the outbound and return legs to break the journeys.

2) Although we'd prefer not to fly in Economy, neither the current economic climate, nor our bank balance, leave us with any other option!! We could possibly combine some PE and Economy each way - to make the trip a bit more comfortable. Would that make sense, or maybe it isn't worth the extra cost?

3) Our preference would be to spend Christmas 2012 in New Zealand - but maybe that's impractical when using points to part pay as seats will be restricted - and it may already be too late? What do you all think?

4) Is using a Virgin Airline Partner with FC points straightforward? i.e. is it a realistic option to spend FC points with a partner Airline?

Grateful for any advice... :D Thanks

Air New Zealand are a partner and are usually good value. You can see the redemption rates here (http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/gb/frequentflyer/fcpartners/airlines/airnewzealand.jsp?bfSubmit1.y=7&bfSubmit1.x=28)

This is an extract (not sure why premium economy rewards aren't detailed anymore, that seems to be a relatively recent change).

UK to LA round trip Economy Class 50K Business Class 75K
LA/San Francisco New Zealand round trip Economy 80k Business 125k
UK to Australia via AKL round trip Economy 120K Business 180K

So if you could get to 150k miles, you could get 2 reward RT from the UK in business to LAX and then pay for the LAX>AKL. Or get one outright economy reward all the way through and pay for another.

Things to look out for: you cannot use miles to upgrade on partner flights, and getting availability will test your tenacity - the way of confirming flights with NZ is quite arduous, You phone Virgin and then have to wait to have availability confirmed, and they can only check one potential reservation at a time.

Good luck!


Fuel surcharges on NZ are also less than Virgin

I can never find Award seats on NZ in J for LAX-LHR vv and AKL-LAX vv especially 2 seats
Maybe it's my luck!

Thanks RedVee - for your helpful advice.

That's given us a good start.



K3nnis - Wishing you better luck in future

I'll see what I can arrange and report back....

Without wanting to sound like the miserable git in the corner - I'll bet you can't get availability on Air NZ. It seems to be one of those "nice in theory" partners, just like SQ, where actually getting to USE your miles on them is near on impossible :(

The ANA tool for availability does show SQ and AZ availability, and it is possible, as once i got 4 J class LHR to LAX!! I've never seen much availability since, but i think you just need to get lucky!! The BMI forum describes how to use the ANA tool to check for seats. Good luck

Anecdotally, the ANA/*A availability tools look at different fare buckets to what VS need for (effectively) "award saver" tickets on Air NZ to be available for the use of their miles....