Apologies if the is a frequent style of question. I’ve had a fair go at working this out with limited results.
Here’s my situation:
My wife and I each have 125000+ Velocity points.
We wish to travel business class from Sydney to Europe.
Our preferred timing is to leave Sydney mid June 2016 returning mid July, but we can be flexible a week either side.
We're happy to fly into almost any European airport to take advantage of the deal.
My issue is trying to find availability for business class rewards when searching the Virgin Australia site, even when I check "Use points and pay". Because I'm flexible with dates and airports there's a lot of trial and error on different searches and most return 10+ flights with 'Sold out' for Business Reward.
Now we should still be in the relatively early stages of flights being released as the August schedule has only just opened up.
Question:
So ultimately I’m looking for advice or tools to assist this process. I don’t mind doing the grunt work, but if I can narrow it down it’ll help:
Is there any tool out there for just searching business reward for Velocity or partners?
As we're flexible with cities, are there routes that we're more likely to have success with? Should we break it into Sydney > Asia and Asia > Europe?
Is our timing for searching just all wrong? I know the theory of searching really early or really late is best, so have we missed it for being early.
Are we going to struggle to get 2 seats? I've been searching for just 1 seat to find anything, but I know from previous US Airways reward flights that airlines can release one at at time, forcing you to gamble on booking that 2nd seat.
I understand your frustration. The systems can be very difficult to search and it can be tiresome finding availability.
I have done extensive searching on Velocity site for business rewards in the past few months and from Australia to Europe. I have just had another quick look and can find quite a bit of availability from Australian cities (Melbourne and Brisbane, less from Sydney directly) to Europe in June 2016.
If you like, I’d be more than happy to run you through things over the phone as it can be quite arduous to explain in writing.
Let me know if that would interest you and how best we could make contact.
Further, I should add for clarity that your 125,000 Velocity points in enough for a business class one way ticket between Australia and Europe, or a return economy. It is not enough for a return business reward per person. Return business per person is 250,000 points each.