Interesting! I few SYD-MEL-SYD today myself but on QF. Looking forward to hearing what VA serve up in business on that short sector.
Originally Posted by
matthandy
I had some Virgin Australia points to use up after 20 or so sectors to and from Adelaide with work. At the time of booking VA were having a sale and I was able to save 15% on the standard price for reward seats. I don't remember the costs exactly but I believe that an economy reward from SYD to MEL cost me 5900 points and business from MEL to SYD cost 11,300 without taxes. VA are quite flexible and allow you to include or exclude the taxes as required. These can be paid with cash. I also used up my remaining few hundred points to save a few more dollars off the total bill. In the end the flights cost 17,871 points and $32.16. I felt that this was actually very poor value. After all, the 17,871 points that I'd collected came from over 18,500 actual flown miles from 26 sectors. Rubbish if you ask me. I don't know what the earn and burn rates are on Qantas but I'd be surprised if they are worse than that.
On QF you'd have earned 26K points for 26x short one way sectors like SYD-ADL, and it would have cost you 8K for a one way economy award and 16K for a one way biz award, i.e. 24K or virtually the same. Because of the way that award costs mirror actual flight costs, Virgin is better value for economy awards when fares are cheap, but worse value for business class (since award costs never represent the actual cost difference of paying for business class over economy).