Virgin (again !) flights and club membership

[Dave R]

Now....I've seen quite a lot of 'Virgin are the best' type messages.

We went to Disney 'on the cheap' 3 years ago - we did 2 weeks in a Days Inn with Charter flights for £1800 for the 4 of us (2 adults and 2 kids) including car hire....Whilst I don't expect to get anything like that kind of deal, there will be 7 of us going next summer to a Villa.

I was just wondering about the flying club membership with Virgin (We always promised ourselves Virgin flights 'next time'...). Does each member of the party have to earn their own flying club points ? Or.....Can 4 of us bung ours together so that we get a free flight next time ? (There's bound to be a 'next' time.....!)

Dave

[steph_goodrum]

I don't think you are allowed to combine points to get a free flight. Children under 12 won't earn any points anyway unfortunately. But it doesn't cost anything to join so it's worth doing. Often they have "miles plus money" promotional fares where you can use around 2000 miles and get a discounted fare, these are all advised to you once you join.

[K4LGB]

Your best way to accumulate joint miles is to use AirMiles (http://www.airmiles.co.uk)!
We both have BA Executive Club membership but it takes ages for us to earn enough for even a ABZ-LHR flight.
My fiancee uses our airmiles to travel to see her folks down south.
We gain our airmiles from all sorts of places!
- Hilton Hotels Worldwide
- Thistle Hotels in the UK
- Nat West credit cards
- Hydro Electric & Hydro Gas
- Shell credit cards
- Shell PlusPoints
- dabs.com
You can also collect at Tesco and House of Frasers but we don't bother as there are none local!

The account is in my name but they don't have any problem with whose name is on the ticket as long as it is sent to the address related to the account!
We were late booking her next ABZ-LHR return trip and the BA website was quoting about £160 for the required dates - I got the ticket through airmiles for 600 airmiles and £40 in taxes!

All these things seem a phaff but they are there for everyone to get benefit of and we have saved a bit of money over the last 5 years or so for no real effort so it's not a bad idea to get an airmiles account setup!

I also believe you can buy a BA Credit Card which gives you additional BA Miles - one of my engineers bought a one-way Concorde Ticket to New York (x2) for his honeymoon trip on a BA CreditCard he got specifically for that purpose. With the additional BA Miles he earned from the transaction he could cash in his BA miles to give him a First Class one-way (x2) on the way back! (see the BA website for details)

Hope this helps
Cheers
Les

[fiona]

We have a BA amex card which collects air miles. We are getting 2 business class flights to Dubai on it for our summer holiday!!!

[chris]

With the BA executive club card you can no longer earn airmiles, you earn BA miles which take a lot longer to accumulate. We have airmiles credit cards through natwest which we earn airmiles on and I shop at tesco. We've paid for our February flights by part cash part miles. Paid 700 miles per person plus £750 for 4 flights (3 adult, 1 child) Hubby bought his ticket using his BA miles and paid £40 so hes still on the same flights as us.

We are all virgin members (apart from the under 12) and earn approx 7500 miles a trip. As said previously miles plus cash is for 2000 miles so just one trip and you can get a flight cheaper (though always check the net for the best priced virgin flights available as you may end up paying more and lose your miles!). You cannot combine accounts like you can with airmiles.