Virgin Atlantic - bidding for an upgrade?
 

I think this has been covered before so please forgive me!

My wife and I are travelling to Havana on Premium Economy - daytime flight, so thought PE would be ok.

Flying back from Jamaica in PE - overnight flight.

The virgin website is offering the 'old' bid thingy to get an upgrade to Upper class. By default the bid for the outbound is £675, the default return flight bid is £710. Our course they are teasing me to bid more as the site is suggesting the chances of getting any upgrade on either leg at these bids is slim (not zero, but slim)

Any advice? we're not made of money and we aren't taking a huge amount of luggage (3 bags between us). I wonder if best to keep the outbound flights at PE and use our financial firing power (such as it is) to bid on the return flights seeing as they are overnight. I don't tend to sleep so well in reclining seats and the flat bed appeals.

What does the panel think in your experience? London flights.

Personally I'd consider the other way round as many will do what you want to and that pushes the bid higher. I'd bid for the lounge and a lovely meal (not quite the restaurant in the sky these days but still good) outbound - I don't sleep particularly well even on the flat bed in Upper. You might have the V-Room outbound though so that might influence things.

Thank you for your feedback. The day we fly back will be quite long and I expect we will be tired at the end of it. We usually find the flatbeds ok to sleep/rest in. Your point about others doing the same thing is interesting though. What is V-room?

I'd welcome any more opinions.

Never bid on Virgin but have done on Swiss. I bid the lowest I could and got it!

Just an update on my original post.

We bid £570 (about £40 above the minimum suggested) for the outbound flight and this has not been accepted. We have bid £500 for the return flight and await a response.

I am thinking that since we have 'saved' ourselves £570 on the outbound flight that I might up the ante on the return flight to increase our chances. Will keep you posted.

Well a final update. We eventually bid £750 for an upgrade from PE to Upperclass on the return journey and didn't get that either. At least we have saved ourselves £1200+ each towards our next holiday. The flight looked pretty full and although the upgrade 'hope-meter' indicated we stood a fair chance it was not to be.

The only piece of excitement was when we were on the start of the runway and then we returned to the jetway. It would appear two passengers were then ejected for unruly behaviour.

Done quite a lot of long haul over the years. Always travelled economy, despite being able to afford better. I never considered that an upgrade was worth the money. Usually, you pay half the cost of a decent Mediteranean cruise for the sake of a good nights sleep. No decent nights sleep is worth that sort of money!.

Cheeky blighters!

Having spoken to the Virgin Flying Club help line this afternoon, it would seem that if you redeem air-miles for an upgrade for part of the journey then any air miles earned as part of the journey are not calculated or added to your account.

What does this mean? Well, we paid cash for economy tickets from London to Havana, and Jamaica to London and used air-miles to upgrade both legs to Premium Economy. We expected to get air miles for the 'real' cash paid element but it seems because we redeemed air-miles for part of the 'experience' the system discounts any air miles earned even though you are entitled to them.

I rang them up this afternoon and had this explained to me after noting that neither Mrs yt or me had been credited with any air-miles for our two journeys (?). To be fair to Virgin they knew exactly what had happened and manually entered the information to our accounts. Every little helps and all that.