While we wait for one of the Virgin Experts to answer, I'll have a go
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1) How easy is it to redeem a premium economy reward from East Coast USA to LHR? Is it often sold out or is there generally plenty of availability?
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East Coast is not too bad for redemptions- obviously the earlier you can book the better. It does help to be a little flexible on dates and they are usually okay a day or two either side.
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2) Does the "free flight anywhere" come out of the same inventory as award flights do, or does it come out of standard inventory?
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It will normally come out of a standard inventory as such that are there for these instances. I booked two Select bookings a while ago for two colleagues to JNB for January - they were taken out of X class availability, even though I couldn't book them two X class revenue tickets. May seem strange - you would expect them to come out of award inventory. Of course if you opt for the miles, then you will be doing a normal redemption so you will come out of the normal award pool of seats.
3) Is Virgin likely to increase the number of miles required to redeem awards for 2004 anytime soon, or will they likely remain as they are currently published?
Who knows - they can change the redemption rates at any time. It has been 50,000 for a fair (or is that fare?
) few years now for those East Coast routes (IAD, NYC, BOS).
It is a genrous compensation in my opinions, I was with my 2 colleagues on the same flight, they were asked if they didn't mind taking a later flight - they got compensation, I didn't as my seat in upper was fine. They took it and we all took a later flight - cheeky monkeys as I had booked their tickets using milesandmoney!
If I ever do get a select voucher I will take the miles straight away.
For you, if you have an AmEx MR card you could look to transfer some points or maybe some from your Hilton account - 80,000 will get you an Upper Class return - well worth the extra 30,000 miles
Thanks,
Richard