Originally Posted by
Tofino87
Hi miklcct,
looks like you’re not far from me!
in short - it’s a very subjective question, depending not only on the routes available, but your spending habits. And your appetite for connecting flights, I would say.
with VS (virgin) points, you have access to the KLM and Air France network too, which could prove helpful.
However, from personal experience specifically with the LHR-HKG route, I would advise that your best value will be in either using VS points to book a premium economy ticket, or purchasing a cash/revenue premium economy ticket, then using a virgin Atlantic credit car to ‘voucher’ to upgrade this to business class.
of course, I don’t know your preferences for cabin of travel, food and drink, etc.
personally I’m 6’1”, legroom is sometimes an issue depending on the carrier and I get *really* twitchy on economy flights over 3 1/2 hours. Business/First is a must for me.
In terms of how you earn VS points, this comes down to your appetites for fees and your spending habits. A short time ago, Virgin Money were offering the Virgin Rewards+ credit card with a 30,000 signup (and minimum spend) bonus, for a £165 first year fee. That’s now gone and is 15,000 - but could come up in the next 12 months.
if memory serves, that puts you a good way towards the points for a PE class ticket to hkg on off-peak dates ( + ££ for taxes and fees).
On the free version of the card, the sign up bonus is much smaller.
Apart from virgin red - another good source for point collection partners would be going to Google and searching ‘Virgin Shops Away UK’. That’s probably quite important, as there are UK, USA, HKG etc versions of the site.
Every account may show slightly different earning rates with different partners. But as a day to day example, you can earn a lot of points (8 per £1 sometimes) with grocery shops at Morrisons or CoOp.
At the end of the day, as I said before it’s all subjective, but all the best going forward on your points journey! I started about 4 years ago and felt late to the game then, so many opportunities with tesco clubcard etc passed by without me even knowing this kind of thing could have been so lucrative.
If you can stomach connections to HKG you have, in my opinion, even better possibilities to redeem VS points with ANA airlines to Japan and beyond.
Feel free to drop me a DM if I can be of any further help.
- Tofino
KLM will be very helpful for me if I go to Netherlands as it flies from Southampton Airport (although I need to get rid of my Aeroflot bonus points first), the most convenient airport for me living in Bournemouth. But I'll still prefer direct flights if one is available at LHR (direct non-stop megabus route from my home) or LGW (extremely cheap train fare). However, it's very unlikely I'll take Air France because if I want to go to France, I'll prefer going direct using surface transport (Channel ferry) from Poole then travel domestically inside. Under nearly no circumstances I will take anything other than economy as the value of a flight to me is like a bus, where transport is the only value (the only times I took other classes are because they were cheaper than economy or I was upgraded). I generally avoid flight connections except when it is a long-haul flight, the mileage is close to direct (i.e. the connection is on the great circle path of the direct route), and the connecting time is short (close to the MCT).
Nearly all of my spending is online now except groceries, and my preference of supermarkets is Lidl, Tesco, then Aldi and Asda. I don't shop at Co-op because the goods are expensive, and there are no Morrisons near me. My major spendings apart from rent per month are groceries (about £150), transport (about £80 in off-peak train tickets, and £80 in local buses, mostly bought online or in app), and sporting activities (about £120 per month). For my travel, I mainly stay in hostels or "business hotels" (in the Chinese sense), and if I have joined Co-wheels Car Club which give me access to car rentals at convenient locations.
I'm still building my credit score so I'll need to wait for a while for me to sign up the credit card, but I'll only use the fee-free version of the Virgin card as I don't spend enough to justify the £165 annual fee.
Originally Posted by
craigthemif
If you are ONLY travelling to HKG and ONLY travelling in Economy, you are probably better off with cashback credit cards and cashback websites, rather than dealing with points.
By the time you add taxes and surcharges, you are generally better off simply buying Economy tickets. If you structure every ticket to be HKG-LHR-HKG then you can avoid most of the surcharges, but that requires multiple trips to HKG each year with fixed, off-peak dates.
So you´re going to find that you put a few years into collecting points only to save a couple hundred quid on airfare...
This hobby starts making sense when you really commit to it, have the income / spending needs to earn a large number of miles / points via your credit card and to then use them to fly in Business Class.
When the world returns to normal, I'll expect to fly back to Hong Kong at least once per year (in January or February, i.e. off-peak season), possibly twice (the other will be around Christmas, i.e. peak season) for sporting activities and to visit my family. I'll fly a lot to other European countries on the most direct or cheapest carrier, and also domestically to Scotland if it is faster than taking trains, but unfortunately Virgin Points can't be used to redeem domestic tickets. I'll still only travel on economy though. I want to get something out of my regular train ticket purchases (about £80 per month) though and my choice is collecting Virgin points (at 3 points per £1) or buying through GWR to collect Nectar points (2 Nectar points per £1, equivalent to at least 1% cashback). If I spend about £1000 per year in train tickets it will take me about 8 years to "earn" a round-trip flight to Hong Kong, and if I choose Nectar points it can earn me about £80 in 8 years.
P.S. in the past when I lived in Hong Kong, Aeroflot was almost always the cheapest airline for Europe with good daytime flights and short connection at SVO, so unless I needed stopovers I was loyal to it, but now my circumstances have changed and my 41k Aeroflot miles are no longer that useful. I'll just spend them on the next available flight and forget them.