My girlfriend and I are travelling to the US in april 2018.
We have not yet booked flights but we are trying to make the most of our 300k velocity points.
Our flights will be:
Sydney - Los Angeles (LAX)
Los Angeles (LAX) - Boston
New York to Las Vegas
Vegas to San Fran
Los Angeles (LAX) - Sydney
My current through process is to fly economy Sydney to Los Angeles (LAX) return and use points to fly Business/First Class On the two long flights within the US (LAX to Boston and New York to Vegas)
I’d be interested to hear other peoples thoughts on this trip as I want to make the most of the points we have to get the best upgrades we can.
Have a play on awardace.com to figure out how much Velocity points it costs (confirm with Velocity mileage calculator as awardace has some mistakes in it) and searching availabilities on the flights and dates you want on virginaustralia.com.
I redeemed First Class for SFO-JFK on Virgin America (may no longer be available after merger with Alaska Airlines) and Business Class for JFK-NRT on Delta Air (later changed to JFK-DTW-NRT because they cancelled the direct route/flight). Flown the above in Mar/Apr 2017 but redeemed them a year earlier around Apr/May 2016. They seem to release 2 seats at the start (not sure whether they release any more after that).
Business Class in USA is not at the same standard as Business Class in Australia/Asia. Usually it is just a blocked middle seat. Same goes with their First Class. Their First Class domestic may be equivalent to Business class on some of the better airlines in Australia/Asia. This is gradually improving of course but just keep that in mind and set your expectations accordingly.
I strongly recommend you try The Business with Virgin Australia for one of your trans pacific flights. As the previous responder has said, business/first class in the US is not great. There will be no lie flat beds etc. in y experience business class in Aus is better than first class in the US.
if you have velocity status you should check out benefits of flying with Delta, I think you get extra leg room in their domestic economy class.
also if you’re considering going business class Syd-LAX make sure you’re on a virgin aircraft, not a code-share Delta aircraft.