Virgin have changed their economy fares. There are now three. I'm looking at going to Melbourne for a marginal reason. From Perth. They don't have getaway fares on the way there. It used to be easy. If there was a saver fare, you could use an Amex ticket entitlement and I've bought over 30 in the last couple of years from my friends here on ozb. I'm wondering if I can use one if these entitlements to fly under the middle fare per-mel. These are new fares, so don't know how many have experience with it. The cheap fares are getaway. The fare I'd have to book at is called elevate.
AmEx Flight Entitlements? Only Getaway or Do They Allow Next level up?
voteoften on 22/09/2016 - 00:40
Comments
that makes it significantly more difficult. In the past, if there were no ff seats, but saver fares were available, you could get the seat. The only exception I ever saw was the few times saver seats went above their unstated limit. Thanks
View the fares in velocity points. Any flight with an economy reward redemption is available to book with an AMEX redemption. Pretty sure anyway, but let me know if I'm wrong.
Yes, that is probably true, but in the past 99.9% of the time if a saver fare was available, you could get the seat, even if they were unavailable for ff points. So if you can only get a seat if it's up for grabs with ff points, this significantly devalues the entitlement.
Yes it would be interesting to know if it's been devalued. Virgin hasn't been doing so well financially and perhaps OzBargainers are taking advantage of all these AMEX redemptions by selling them to West Australian's.
I had the idea that in the past if an economy reward redemption was available then you can use the AMEX redemption, even if a saver fare was unavailable?
As someone who hs bought and redeemed over 20 of these entitlements, I would have to say they are less valuable because redemption seats are not as available as the old saver fares. It's impossible to remember a case where you could only get an economy seat with the minimum number of points but not with cash. If that were to happen, I would have booked with ff points even though it costs a bit more in value. This is because ff seats are more flexible that entitlement seats. That adds value to the ticket.
Perhaps, it might be treated internally as the odd occasion when I had to pick another flight or in one instance pay a bit more on top of the entitlement. They might cop an elevate fare of $399 to Sydney but not $549.
I think that the lack of certainty devalues these. I always knew when my past purchases would be honoured.
The T&C for the flight used to be non-stop saver class fare.
If it has switched to economy rewards fare, does this mean that the non-stop rule still applies?
I had been wondering the same thing myself. I couldn't find an answer anywhere online, so I simply called the number on the back of my Amex Platinum Edge card and asked. The good news is that it's Elevate rather than Getaway. The bad news is that Amex may not have seats to offer, even though there are Elevate fares available. For example, for a CBR <> MEL trip that Mrs 2905 is considering in about a months time, even though there are Elevate fares available on seven of the eight MEL > CBR flights on the day she has in mind, Amex could only offer seats on two of them.