Virgin have just emailed their latest update to their rebooking process and it’s remarkable. Well it’s remarkable in comparison to what most other airlines are doing at the moment. I wrote a few days ago about my experience with United when they cancelled my flights – no refund, either rebook or get a voucher and oh yes, you need to pay any fare difference too.
Well Virgin had launched a really customer friendly policy:
- Change your travel date up to 30 April 2021 (BA is offering 1 August 2020!)
- No change fee
- And if you travel before 30 June 2020, there is no fare difference to pay either
- These changes apply to award tickets and paid tickets
| Flexible flying |
| In support of getting you where you need to go as smoothly as we can, we have adjusted some of our commercial policies.
If you have a ticket issued before 19th March 2020 and would like to change your travel to any date before the 30th April 2021, we are waiving our change fee and you will not be charged for making that change. In addition, if you’re travelling before 30th June 2020 we are waiving the fare difference on top of waiving the change fee. For any travel after that date, you will need to pay any difference in fare. Please see our policy for further details. These apply to Flying Club redemption bookings as well as normal tickets. Click here to keep an eye on the most up to date travel information. |
I had an India-UK-US flight as part of a return on a round trip March 18. They basically ended up flying an empty plane to LHR but I couldn’t make it since I couldn’t get back into India as they imposed travel restrictions by that date and I was in a separate country near India). They said I could defer until Dec 31, 2020 but change fee would be imposed, fare difference would apply, and I had to fly that exact route by the end of the year instead of being able to get any sort of credit for the unused portion of the trip. Obviously it gets tricky when one leg of the trip was already flown but I find the lack of flexibility entirely customer unfriendly and their policy among the worst out there. So they’re basically requiring that I go to India, the other side of the world, just to fly the return portion of the prem economy fare. That’s a rough policy in my eyes.
Partly used tickets are seeming to be much more complex than unused ones. Sorry to hear about the experience.