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Today is the last day that members of the Virgin America Elevate program can book redemptions with airline partners (other than parent Alaska Airlines). In reality there is not much of a loss taking place, in that the only partner that has a worthwhile redemption is Virgin Australia. Per an earlier post partners Singapore Airlines, Emirates, and Hawaiian really didn’t have a method to pickup a valuable booking, but Virgin Australia does have very valuable, and last minute, redemptions that will be missed.
Elevate allows for a US-Australia (and reverse) redemptions in Virgin Australia business class for 45,000 Elevate points. That’s a down right steel. The problem of course is availability. Virgin Australia only allows partner redemptions about 4 days out. Throw in the additional fact that Elevate requires 72 hours advance booking for international partners, and this redemption requires one extremely flexible travel schedule. These redemptions are unicorns – but findable unicorns. And today, September 30th, 2017 is the last day to make these redemptions.
To find open redemption dates use the Virgin Australia web site search engine. For today 3 awards are still bookable:
Virgin Australia web site search engine
Look for Business Reward bookings for partner redemptions
On Wednesday October 4th LAX-SYD is open
VA913 is LAX to Brisbane
Going down to Australia, Virgin Australia has the following redemptions available.
Tuesday October 2nd: VA 816 – Los Angeles to Melbourne Australia
Wednesday October 3rd: VA1 – Los Angeles to Sydney Australia
Wednesday October 3rd: VA913 – Los Angeles to Sydney Australia
You’ll have to find another way home, but there are several methods including Delta that has last minute redemptions ranging from 95,000 to 115,000 SkyMiles, on the low side.
Obligations at home never allowed me to redeem this way of traveling down under to the island continent. At 45,000 Virgin America Elevate points per direction it is something that won’t occur again in the points universe. Hopefully some of you took advantage of this unique redemption.
