My partner and I are looking to do our first holiday with our <1 year old! We have 255k velocity points and want to go to Barcelona and Tel Aviv from Sydney in Jan/Feb.
We’ve searched a few of the rewards sites but this is all very new to us, would the best option be to use velocity points to fly to Barcelona and then make our own way to Tel Aviv and use velocity points to fly back to Sydney? It looks like we can get flights for between 65k and 75k points per a person per a leg, is that good?
Hi,
You could do SYD-SIN-BCN for 75k Velocity per person in economy. If you have 280k points total, you could do TLV-AUH-SYD for 65k points per person. You would need to pay separately for getting from Barcelona to Tel Aviv.
Velocity doesn’t charge for on lap infants. However, Velocity does charge a surcharge for redemptions on partner airlines, which is unavoidable as Virgin Australia doesn’t fly to Europe. From memory, surcharge for Singapore Airlines is less than for Etihad.
Thank you, and is $75k and $65k good?
Not sure what that question means but that is the set point costs for economy reward seats for that route (distance). If you are wondering whether that is good use of your Velocity points, you could check what it costs in cash and divide that by 65 or 75k to work out the cents per point (cpp). Alternatively, you could work out how much you would be willing to pay for the same flight in cash, and divide that by 65 or 75k to work out the cents per point.
I personally prefer the latter method.
If your cpp is greater than 2cpp, that is not a bad redemption in my books. Obviously, if you redeem in business/first class, the cpp would be generally higher.
Thank you, I think where I got confused was there were similar flights with different point costs. I think it relates to different carrier costs coupled with distance.
Yes the 65k and 75k is a good sign - that means you are redeeming for the Reward seats which are the cheapest and best value redemptions. If you see some outrageous amount like 200k+, that means you are redeeming for an Anytime seat, essentially converting your points into cash and buying a ticket - you don’t want to do that.
Different airlines cost slightly different amounts in Velocity points but they should generally be around the same range of 60-80k!!