A big Virgin Atlantic Flying Club devaluation may be on the way, but should you care?

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Virgin Atlantic issued a press release yesterday that gave us a heads up that we may be seeing a big devaluation to the Virgin Flying Club from the end of this month, but as the team leading the Flying Club program has chosen not to provide any real details about what’s heading our way, it’s hard to say just how bad the upcoming changes are.

More importantly, however, should anyone really care?

What we know

The press release was 750+ words long, but it actually told us very little other than the fact that it looks like the Flying Club program is moving to dynamic award pricing, so we’re going to have to rely on a Q&A that Head for Points managed to secure with Virgin Atlantic’s Vice President of Loyalty to try to work out what we can expect.

In brief, this is what we think will be happening from 30 October 2024:

• Every seat that Virgin Atlantic sells will be bookable with points.
• The higher the cash fare the higher the cost of an award booking is likely to be.
• Some bookings in Premium Economy and Upper Class (Business Class) will earn more points.
• Flying Club hopes to be more like Flying Blue than Delta SkyMiles but has not confirmed if there will be a cap on the cost of awards.
• Awards called ‘saver awards’ will still be available, but as their cost will be linked to the the cash fares being sold for travel on the same dates (just like all other awards), the name means very little and we shouldn’t expect too much.
• Virgin is claiming that the changes mean that under the new system, there will be dates on which it will be possible to book awards using fewer points than are needed right now.

Interestingly, there doesn’t appear to be any solid information available surrounding the ludicrous surcharges that Virgin Atlantic currently adds to its awards, and as that is the primary reason award bookings on Virgin Atlantic are such atrocious value, that’s a very important piece of the jigsaw that’s missing.

Why is Virgin Atlantic doing this?

Well, as I don’t work for Virgin, I don’t know. But I can speculate.

Something that everyone should be keeping in mind when looking at anything that Virgin Atlantic does is that 49% of the airline is owned by Delta, so it should be no surprise to anyone that Flying Club has been becoming a more and more useless program with every year that passes by.

Delta wrote the book on screwing over frequent flyers and the book on how to decimate the value of a reward currency, so that is probably playing a part here.

I would speculate that Delta would like to see Virgin monetize its loyalty currency more than it is right now, and for it to do that, it needs to make it easier for people to use their points.

If points can be easily used, it will encourage customers to collect more via credit card sign-ups, points sales, and every other way that allows Virgin to sell its currency to the likes of Amex, Citi, Chase, Capital One, Barclays, etc…

That’s how Delta makes billions, so it makes sense that it would like to see Virgin Atlantic do the same.

Just to be clear …

Making points easy to use may sound like a positive thing, but it’s only a positive thing if the points were easy to use AND if they offered value, but I strongly suspect that Delta/Virgin is only focusing on the first bit of that equation and not of the second bit. After all, when was the last time Delta showed any interest in offering value through SkyMiles?

Thoughts

Contrary to what the VP of Loyalty at Virgin Atlantic was trying to spin (most of which was utter nonsense), nothing that’s revealed on 30 October is likely to have anything to do with giving ‘a boost to Flying Club members’ or making ‘improvements’ for members, and it will have everything to do with making more money.

And that’s fair enough because that’s one of the primary functions of the airline, but the leadership at Virgin Atlantic would look considerably less slimy and disingenuous if they just came out and said that rather than coming out with what anyone with more than a couple of brain cells can tell is spin and lies.

Here’s a gem from Shai Weiss the CEO of Virgin Atlantic:

“Our customers mean the world to us. We are flying because of them and for forty years we have existed to make their journeys safe and special. Our aim is always to do right by them and to make them smile.”

Really Shai? You want to make your customers smile? You want to do right by them? How does that dovetail with $1,500+ surcharges on award tickets and devaluations year after year? How does the man have the gall to come out with **** like that?

Having said all of this, however, there’s a more important question to ask.

If the upcoming changes to Flying Club only affect the way awards work on Virgin Atlantic bookings, should most of us really care?

The fact is that thanks to the ridiculously high surcharges that Virgin Atlantic adds to its awards, using Flying Club points for Virgin Atlantic flights has been highly uneconomical for most people for years, so as long as there’s no change to the cost of awards on Air France, KLM and ANA, most people shouldn’t really be affected too badly regardless of what Weis & Co. announce at the end of the month.

Sure, there’s going to be a population of UK-based Flying Club members who are probably going to be adversely affected, but if you’re going to dabble in a loyalty program of an airline that’s effectively controlled by Delta, you have to be prepared to get burned. It’s not like the warning signs weren’t there.

Bottom line

Virgin Atlantic will be making wholesale changes to its Flying Club program from the end of this month and while the changes appear to be moving the program to a dynamic pricing system, we don’t yet know what that system will look like.

For the time being we’re in ‘wait and see’ mode and can’t really comment on what’s coming until we see more details, but as long as the changes only affect the already dismal Virgin Atlantic awards and not the awards on partner airlines, most people reading this shouldn’t be too badly affected.