Is there any way to get around pricing error on Virgin website when booking with Velocity points?

Flights & Airfares
1

Hello!

I’ve been trying to redeem 2x business rewards seats on the way back from Europe in December this year (I know, ideally it would be 330 days before, so lesson learnt for next time!)

The questions I have is:

  1. I seem to keep hitting the seats, but they seem to be gone straight away? (Investigation shows this may be a cache issue, but even after deleting all my browser history just this morning and re-searching, I found flights that once again gave me the dreaded “pricing error” on my first go) Is it any body else’s experience? (Just so I know i’m not gaslighting myself!)
  2. The Velocity redemption team can’t help because the European reward seats are provided by their partners (Qatar/SIA), so they’ve got no idea when it comes up/when they can book it (Which resulted in myself spending a weekend in front of the PC repeatedly refreshing and getting the familiar pricing error webpage).
  3. Does anyone have any other avenue here to book a business reward flight from Europe back to Australia?

first1
first1921×1242 114 KB

Thanks for reading!

2

Unfortunately, it may be a case of phantom availability (the seats were never there to book and were showing up in error). This morning, I couldn’t locate those same reward seats on the Virgin Australia website or on Qatar Airways’ website.

3

Thanks for the reply Brandon!

Do you know what could cause it? I was led to believe its a cache issue but yeah…

4

This is a known issue when searching for reward seats using Velocity; the search engine is, to use the technical term, broken. It’s extremely frustrating when searching for reward availability and I haven’t been able to find a solution or workaround at this stage. If anyone has one, please let us know!

5

Haha thanks sixtyeight! Good to know it doesnt just happen to me!

6

Just thought I’d come back in here, drop a line and confirm that it is a bug with no solution (i’ve gone down rabbit holes with velocity and also Qatar, as their booking partner releasing the seats hahaha)