Dingdongler

I don't have to fly as necessity for work so probably don't have as many as some here but I do have a few BA and Virgin airmiles.

I'm trying to book a family holiday for next Easter and seem to be struggling to use them.

Is there a knack to it or are they just generally useless??

davyboy

I dunno. But I'd be happy to take the virgin ones from you.

cster

Bit of a learning curve I dare say.
I get all of mine with my Natwest Mastercard, so it is very straight forward as they partner with Easyjet - great if you and your family enjoy cheap holidays
Not that this is any help to you.

nik52wrx

We use virgin Atlantic air miles. The wife usually calls the airline and sorts it all out over the phone. We use ours for upgrading to premium economy.
Shopping at Tesco's gets us Virgin air miles, you can transfer Tesco club points across to Virgin

Nik

ReallyReallyGoodMeat

I've heard that with things like Avios the best way to use them is to upgrade rather than pay for the flight, something to do with them not covering the taxes? So if you use them to pay for a flight you end up spending more points per mile than you do when you upgrade.

boxst

I have lots of BA points (Avios now) and haven't managed to use them.

There are a couple of reasons: availability seems to be very, very limited so difficult to get flights that you want even with the MONTH that you want and secondly BA changed the rules so you have to pay tax. So if I book a ticket to San Francisco, it'll cost £400+ in taxes. At certain times, the ticket is only £500...

With regards to upgrades, BA do not allow you to upgrade certain types of tickets (the cheap ones ...) with points.

Dingdongler

Thanks. I have avios and virgin miles. My wife has a ba credit card and I have a virgin one.


Last year we used the avios miles to upgrade the seats on our family holiday and it worked out well. When I'm trying this time around for next Easter (ie 4 months in advance) I just keep being told there are no avios eligible seats on those flights.

The last BA bod I spoke to said the avios eligible seats on many popular routes sell out within a few weeks of being released ie 11.5 months in advance!

Steve vRS

I used a load (130000) to pay for a 4 day break next year at the Hotel New York in Disneyland Paris which I know is not everyone's cup of tea but we like it. We like it even better when it is free! I even managed to include an evening meal and show in the package.

That was driving there paying for the Eurotunnel with Tesco vouchers so all we have to pay for is the diesel (co. car so wear and tear is not my concern).

Steve

Dingdongler

That seems like a very good deal Steve

Maybe I just need to try a bit harder