At the beginning of the month I mentioned Spencer Howard who runs a free email newsletter where he sends out award availability alerts. He’s found something interesting: Wide open business class awards for four or more passengers between the U.S. and Europe in Virgin Atlantic’s new product for multiple cities.

Virgin Atlantic New Business Class

A year ago Virgin Atlantic announced their new business class debuting on the Airbus A350-1000. It’s a gorgeous product, and a great improvement over their standard business seat (but does not offer doors, and isn’t in the league of QSuites or ANA’s ‘The Room’ in my view).

Credit: God Save the Points

Credit: God Save the Points

Reasonable To Book Now For Early 2021

Virgin of course is grounded, along with much of the world’s airlines. They’re in a tough financial spot, since they haven’t received government funding the way British Airways has. And Delta, which effectively controls them, isn’t in a position to inject additional cash (and can’t legally increase its ownership stake either).

However the airline has London Heathrow slots, which will one day be very valuable again, which gives them pretty good odds of survival. If you have Virgin Atlantic miles I’d personally commit those to awards like business class between the West Coast and London (or elsewhere in Europe) rather than transferring them to Hilton or IHG and taking a huge haircut.

If you redeem miles from (bailed out) Delta or miles from (bailed out) Air France KLM for Virgin Atlantic awards and Virgin folds, you’ll still get your miles back.

Which Routes Are Available?

Spencer found availability for four business class award seats flying on the new A350-1000:

• New York JFK – London Heathrow: January – March, 2021 plus the first week of April
  
• Los Angeles – London Heathrow: January – March, 2021
  
• San Francisco – London Heahrow: January – March, 2021

Note that while the San Francisco flight was announced to be flown with an Airbus A350-1000, it is currently scheduled as a 787 – not the new business class, but also several days where I’m seeing more than four award seats in business class and this is historically a real rarity from the West Coast.

Whose Miles To Use?

Your best bet redeeming for U.S. – Europe is Delta SkyMiles at 86,000 miles each way if you’re traveling just to London, or the price goes down to 75,000 miles each way if you connect onward such as to Paris (on Air France) or Amsterdam (KLM). Delta doesn’t add fuel surcharges to awards originating in the U.S. American Express points transfer to Delta.

You might consider flying to London but booking a one-way to Paris as a throwaway with no luggage, but then the return trip gets more expensive because a Europe-originating one way to the U.S. will incur surcharges.

You can also spend 72,000 Flying Blue miles and a couple hundred bucks each way, Flying Blue is a transfer partner of Amex, Chase, Citi and Capital One.

You’re going to want to avoid actually cashing in Virgin Atlantic miles for Virgin Atlantic travel, with taxes and fees as high as $1500 roundtrip, unless of course you have a big haul of Virgin miles and need something to do with them (Virgin of course is a transfer partner across the bank currencies as well.)

While the world is shut down now, there’s a good chance that things will be opened up by early next year when these seats are available. That projection could change of course depending on the course of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.