30 October will forever be a day burned in to all our memories. The day that Virgin Atlantic’s Flying Club members were dreading. The day the airline binned off a fixed price award chart in “favour” of dynamic pricing. The headlines have been pretty awful, so lets take a look at what some of the changes mean.

It’s dreadful. The End.

Well…it’s not all bad. There are some nice little treats buried in the changes, but on the whole, you can see why the initial response to this is overwhelmingly negative.

I checked for flights from London to Orlando which came out at 238K + £1020 in fees. The cash fare is about £7000 for 2 people, so it’s not dreadful value for money but still a hike of double the amount of points that you would have previously needed. Notice that the tax amounts are different on the flights too – I’m sure there’s a logic there, but I haven’t figured out what it is yet. 76k, however, isn’t bad at all and is cheaper than the old chart – in fact, anything under 117k is comparable or better than before.

In economy, the 157,500 points + £278 in fees makes absolutely no sense when the cash fare is £490. The lowest cash fare obviously doesn’t include bags and seats, but how does the points cost correlate to the cash cost? In that specific example, economy is almost twice the cost of business and 3 times the cost of premium! That’s not that unusual for dynamic pricing, but is the first time we’ve seen it on Virgin. But, as with the business class pricing, loads of dates for 29k or 37k points, which isn’t terrible.

I thought that one-ways might be a mega casualty as one-ways, especially in business class, can be staggeringly expensive. But, I was wrong. Very wrong.

I kid you not, that’s actual availability for 29k points per person in business class from London to New York. Those flights in cash would be over £8000 for 2 people. If that isn’t a sweet deal, I don’t know what is. The cheapest that would have been before the change was 47.5k points, so that is a definite saving. Even in economy, that’s still an awesome deal at 6k points. The cash fare would be about £1100.

I’d seen some pretty scary prices for LAX, and there’s no denying that they’re triple what they were, and even more in some cases. 

I was interested to see what the pricing was like if not staying a Saturday night, as midweek fares can be really high to the States as it’s usually business travellers not staying over the weekends – 335k + fees. The same flights for cash would be about £3500.

I struggled to find any “deals” to LAX, but saw plenty of dates with seats in business class for 500k + £1000 in fees! That’s nearly 5 times the previous cost. Premium, however, had loads of dates with seats as low as 44k points (but as high as 280k!). It was broadly the same for San Francisco and Vegas. 44k is slightly cheaper than what an off-peak date was before the change.

Another route that has been hit badly is Male and, frankly, it’s terrifying. 700k + taxes was the highest I found, with the lowest around 265k. What was also interesting with Male is the fees were the same regardless of the number of points, which wasn’t the case with the USA flights. 

Of course, one benefit is that every seat on the plane is now meant to be available for points. This is an improvement to before, but only really matters if you’re points rich. For your average leisure traveller, if the reward seat wasn’t available and the cash fare was too high, you’d just go somewhere else or not go at all. I did notice some hikes in price when searching for more than 2 people so the pricing works in “buckets” the same as cash fares do – that’s handy to know if you’re looking for 4 seats, try splitting in to 2 bookings of 2 and see if it’s cheaper.

In that same theme, the losers here seem to be families or people restricted to travelling at peak times. There are deals out there but you need to flexible to get them (which was always the case for reward flights, to be fair).

So what does this mean for the reward voucher with the Virgin Atlantic branded credit card? If you’re a Red member, you’ll get a 75k points discount off your booking. Sadly though, because you don’t know how many points you’ll need for the flights, and 75k off 2 flights to Male at 1,400,000 makes so little difference, I’m not sure the credit card is even worth bothering with.

If that makes you want to switch to BA and start earning Avios, hit me up for a referral code to earn extra bonus points on the BA credit card!