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Searching for Virgin Atlantic award space is now a piece of cake, thanks to the launch of the Virgin Atlantic reward seat calendar checker. The new tool is in beta testing, allowing you to search for award availability by calendar month.
The new tool is limited, with only two airlines to choose from (Virgin Atlantic and Delta). Still, it's an incredibly exciting development. Plus, if fully implemented, it will make searching for award space a walk in the park!
How Does the Virgin Atlantic Reward Seat Calendar Work?
This tool is intuitive and straightforward. The first step is to choose which airline you are looking for award space with. At this point, you can only choose Virgin Atlantic or Delta. Next, choose your departure point. Choosing Virgin Atlantic gives you three departure points.
- London Heathrow (LHR)
- Manchester (MAN)
- Edinburgh (EDI)
Select Delta and these origins are available:
- London Heathrow (LHR)
- London Gatwick (LGW)
- Edinburgh (EDI)
After selecting the airline and origin city, you can then select your destination and your desired month of travel. For instance, we have chosen Virgin Atlantic for a flight from London Heathrow (LHR) to New York (JFK) in June 2023.
Hit “Check for reward seats,” and voila! All the award space in June 2023 on Virgin's flagship route.
If you can't find the space you need, or it does not work with your travel plans, you can click through the following or previous months using arrows at the top right.
The functionality does not end there. You also can click on the return button to see the availability of return award space on your selected route.
You will then see the space for that month for the return leg of your trip. As with the initial search, you can cycle through the months to see additional award space.
This ability to search for return flights is incredibly useful. It creates an excellent workaround to use the calendar search functions to find space if you are not departing from one of the destinations options. Say you wanted to fly from New York to London in July 2023. You would follow the previous steps but set your return date for July.
The month is wide open with some excellent award availability in Upper Class. After finding availability, you can head over to the regular Virgin Atlantic Flying Club site and book the award you found.
Bookmark for Repeatability
The way Virgin Atlantic built this reward calendar checker means it has some excellent features that simplify checking for awards again in the future, looking to see if any space has opened up. Looking at the URL of any search, you'll see that it contains the route, airline, month, and even year.
Simply bookmarking this page means you can quickly return to the search results to see if any award space has opened up — or to find out if the space you wanted is still available. This bookmarking ability lets you take your planning to a new level if you are looking at more complex itineraries involving a couple of hops on Virgin Atlantic aircraft.
Related: The Trick to Using the Virgin Atlantic Monthly Reward Calendar
Delta Award Space Availability Workaround
One thing to keep in mind is that this tool lets you search Delta partner award space. While this functionality was a little hit-and-miss earlier, it seems to be working well now. To use this functionality, simply select Delta as your preferred airline instead of Virgin. Next, select a route pairing; in this case, we selected London Heathrow (LHR) to Atlanta (ATL).
Now, you will have to manipulate URLs to get the desired results. Looking at the address bar, you will notice the city paring of LHR and ATL.
You must modify those airport codes to use the Virgin Atlantic reward seat calendar to search for an alternate award flight. Remember, you can only search for routes where Delta operates a direct flight.
For instance, from its hub in Atlanta, Delta operates a direct service to Los Angles (LAX), Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW), and Seattle-Tacoma (SEA). Swap the airport codes for the route you want. For instance, switching currently works for flights between Seattle and Atlanta.
Hit return, and you should see the results of your search. In this case, it seems like there is lots of award space available on that route in August 2023.
We tried a few other city pairings, including, DFW to ATL in August 2023.
Yet again, August seems to be a good month with lots of award space available in economy, premium economy, and premium cabins.
Even on some busier routes, like ATL to LAX, we still found plenty of award space in August 2023.
Other international awards
One thing to keep in mind is that the Virgin Atlantic reward seat calendar is not restricted to Delta flights within the U.S. or to/from the U.K. You can use it to search for other international routes. For instance, in September 2023, award space from Amsterdam (AMS) to Atlanta is decent but not spectacular.
Award space from Johannesburg (JNB) to Atlanta is virtually non-existent in August 2023. However, we did find four economy-class awards available.
If you fancy heading down under in November, there is some award space available from Los Angeles to Sydney (SYD). At this point, it's almost entirely economy-class awards.
One thing to keep in mind is that the Delta award space available to Virgin is likely available to other SkyTeam partners. After finding award space, it may be worth checking which partner will give you the best deal. This is doubly true if you are transferring flexible credit card points to book the awards and have several options.
Boosting Your Virgin Atlantic Flying Club Balance
It may not seem that you have as many ways to earn Virgin Atlantic points in the U.S. as, say, American Airlines or Delta. However, unlike these two airlines, Virgin Atlantic is a transfer partner with six major flexible points currencies.
With so many partners, you don't have to have a big balance in one currency to access Virgin Atlantic awards. Having six partners lets you consolidate multiple, smaller flexible point balances toward your next award.
You can transfer all the following points currencies to the Virgin Atlantic Flying Club:
- American Express Membership Rewards: 1:1 transfer rate; most transfers process immediately
- Bilt Rewards: 1:1 transfer rate; most transfers process immediately
- Capital One Rewards: 1:1 transfer rate; most transfers process immediately
- Chase Ultimate Rewards: 1:1 transfer rate; most transfers process immediately
- Citi ThankYou Points: 1:1 transfer rate; most transfers process immediately
- Marriott Bonvoy: 3:1 transfer rate plus a 5,000-point bonus for each 20,000 points received; most transfers take one or two days
Remember, if you are looking to transfer Capital One miles, you can't transfer them directly to Virgin Atlantic Flying Club. Instead, you will need to transfer your miles to Virgin Red first. After that, you can link your accounts to use Virgin points via Flying Club.
Our Take
Holy smokes! We wish every other airline would take a page out of Virgin Atlantic's playbook and introduce a reward calendar tool that works and is exceptionally useful for its program members.
Typically, finding award space is a pain, given that you can see just one day or a few days in a single search. Being able to see the big picture and check availability for a whole year in a matter of minutes is superb.
At this moment, the site states that Virgin Atlantic is beta-testing this reward seat calendar. Let's hope it's a success. In the long run, we want this to become a permanent feature. Virgin Atlantic could take this calendar to the next level by incorporating other partner award space and adding more cities as available origin points.
What do you think of this incredible new tool from Virgin Atlantic?
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