We recently saw Virgin Atlantic overhaul its Flying Club program, by introducing dynamic award pricing. In light of that, I wanted to take an updated look at the program’s useful feature that lets you find the lowest priced awards with ease.
In this post:
Find the best deals on Virgin Atlantic award flights
It’s always great when airlines make it easy to search and book award space, and that’s exactly what Virgin Atlantic offers with its Reward Flight Checker. Keep in mind that with the new Virgin Atlantic Flying Club program, you can redeem points for any seat on a flight. The catch, of course, is that award pricing varies wildly, depending on when you’re traveling, with prices both much higher and much lower than we saw under the old program.
This is where the Reward Flight Checker comes into play, as it allows you to view award pricing by route for an entire calendar month, spread across all cabins. You can also then easily switch between months, so you can search an entire year of award availability on a particular route in about a minute (Flying Club opens award seats 331 days out).
The pricing displayed will be the starting price for travel in each cabin by day. If you see a flight with the little red tag next to it, that means the date has saver award seats, which are Virgin Atlantic’s lowest priced awards (though still with dynamic pricing).
Note that you can’t actually book tickets directly from the Reward Flight Checker. Instead, you’d then need to navigate back to the search feature to actually book your ticket.
This is one of the best award search tools out there
Virgin Atlantic’s Reward Flight Checker is possibly the best executed award pricing search feature offered by any airline. There aren’t many airlines that so easily give you an overview of the nonstop award pricing in any market over the course of a year, across all cabins.
With the new Flying Club program, there are more opportunities to get amazing value than ever before, assuming you’re flexible. Tools like this make it easy to get the most bang for your points.
It’s amazing how difficult some airlines make it to search award availability, and that’s why there’s also value to award search services like point.me and seats.aero.
Bottom line
Virgin Atlantic has a great Reward Seat Checker feature, which is even more useful with the program having shifted to dynamic award pricing. This allows you to search award pricing across all cabins for a month at a time, and you can potentially go through an entire year of availability in a minute.
While this feature was useful when Virgin Atlantic didn’t have dynamic award pricing, it’s even more valuable now, given the huge variance in award pricing.
What do you make of the Virgin Atlantic Reward Seat Checker?
I'm finding SeatSpy better - you can throttle up/down the # of points, # of seats, and get 11 months results in a single page.
The problem with the tool is it seems to have some caching implemented therefore what you see is generally not what is available!
If it worked it would be good but it also doesn't give you any indication of amount of seats available at certain levels...
Great tool but many days have incorrect pricing. LHR to JFK shows many days with 29k in J. I could not reproduce when trying to book??
Technology out of the UK that actually works? I thought this was impossible.
This would be great if it actually worked. Reward Seat Checker says there lowest price for Upper Class JFK-LHR on Oct 4 is 41K, but when you actually search, the lowest price is actually 60K. Checked to be sure the one low-priced seat hadn't been taken in the time between searches, but Reward Seat Checker still showing 41K. Useless.
One bad experience, therefore useless. Got it.
Same with May 2 May 7 RT IAD LHR Only difference between 29,000 on award finder is much greater actual price 180,000 for crapy seats no thanks
Unfortunately the work around to change the airport codes in the URL to search delta availability seems to have stopped working (at least as of a few weeks ago). Not that it matters much though… given how restricted delta partner award have been for a few years.
This is a great update though!
Yes this was a nice feature but as you said, no longer works. Only AF/flying blue reward search for DL space?