Kinda makes sense if the biggest amount of grease wins the day.  Very Las Vegas.

Not sure it should have made the top10 of names to replace it with....

Harry Reid airport nowadays..... inspirational stuff.

Enjoy the remainder!

Currently booked on a flight next June using an expired voucher that they have honoured twice with covid rollovers, so I'll be a little upset if it doesnt!

They do expire, (probably got expiry info with the award) wouldn't recommend phoning for that at the moment, new seat sale went live, going to be a long wait to get through.

Although they expire, what I did was make a booking, and then roll the booking over (rather than get a refund) and the voucher was still honoured.

Difficult to do it any better than that. 

Ty, interested to hear if anything opens up.  Obviously the seat map that they see is heavily correlated with the website and I guess will often be in synch, but it only needs to be 1 seat different to get what you need when the website won't.  Pretty good customer service from that team, never had a bad call with anyone, even if not able to get me exactly what I wanted they have been able to give me an accurate steer of what could be done.

When were you looking to go?  I believe it is scarce as many people report, I usually have to take 2nd or 3rd choice of dates but I'm normally booking well into the future (June flight booked UC no issues, 2 seats) I'm not sure if that makes a difference.

What I would recommend, based on my last few experiences, is to phone Cardiff.  It does take an hour or more on hold, but with a handful of dates to hand that I could do, they have usually managed to get something to suit.  They have many times said "we can see the system and it is NOT the same availability as you see on the website."  Seems like it would be a good idea if their website was improved so that it was the same, but hey-ho.  Emails are a waste of time (the Cardiff team don't get those, seems like they are outsourced (and poorly, at that) WA didn't get a response, but phone and credit card in hand has worked, and they were additionally accommodating rolling over flights that were impacted by covid.

I am always gunning for UC because I still believe that to be the pick of the way to use points, but there are good alternatives, including using miles to go economy and upgrade into PE using credit card voucher (dunno if they still do this, I stopped getting emails from them)

Ultimately, it is well worth checking dates and buying your way into UC via miles whenever that is a decent saving over paying the cash fare.

Time for a 9year update!

Virgin now do peak and off-peak tables for spend miles and Vegas is definitely a bit more expensive nowadays.  On the flip-side, my own recent experience is that Flying Club have been pretty helpful with cancelling/rolling over flights due to the pandemic and seat availability has been ample.  Phoning Wales has got much better results for me than using other routes, where I got a few templated answers to unasked questions before giving up and grabbing the phone (1 hour wait)

There is currently a buy miles with up to 60% promo, so let's take another look-see and we might be able to sit in Upper for less than we were nearly going to absent-mindely pay for Economy.  Or not.  I honestly don't know yet, but here is my working:

Assumptions:
1. You have 0 miles.  Obvioously if you already have some, the numbers get better.
2. Once you buy miles, you can readily convert them into a seat on an acceptable date.  I realise this isn't always going to be true, so you might want to check availabilty before laying out for miles.  Or just get the miles anyway.

Off-peak: 30k / 55k / 135k
Peak:  50k / 75k / 155k

Buy 120k miles + 72k bonus miles = 192k miles for £1815.  This is the minimum mile purchase for the 60% tier to kick in.

A quick check on airport tax, econ ~ £272 PE ~ £487 and UC = £660 for the date I sampled.

So, 2 peak PEs?  ^^ £2800 (and you'd have 42k miles left over, so likely your next solo would be free too)

1 x UC off-peak?  £2500 and enough miles left over for a PE solo flight next time.

Not the bargains of old, but then UC was 100k miles and really was a gimme.  Still some decent value to be had here I think, and needless to say, a viable alternative to anyone thinking about paying £2500+ for an Upper ticket.

Good luck Alex.

I'm looking at travelling to Las Vegas next June, Group of 4 looking for self catering. I'm looking at vrbo, Booking.com and airbnb. Any other websites I should be looking at? Thanks.

Craigslist?  Fwiw, never used it.

Interested to hear what sort of thing you have in mind tee'd up (or as a benchmark to gauge what is out there and possible alternatives)  In the past, I have steered away from it just happy to pay a premium to be on strip and not have any comeback from shady counterparties.  When I used to grind a lot of poker I often used hotels that came with a decent self-catering option (Vdara, Elara, Trump (whoops) Signature )  Unsure if you are looking for an off-strip 5BDR pad with pool, or something else.  With the obscene cost of car rental right now, getting 2 adjacent rooms in Vdara might not be horrible, in terms of price, comfort and proximity.

I spend all week giving it away.... gotta claw it back somehow

It still seems a lot. I just put some random 2week trips in Jan in and it was coming out with change from £2k pp in Upper.

https://gyazo.com/cd374d685c3b3017e10891583a19953b

Sean Lock.  Funny guy.

RIP.

Here's the range of answers given. (Ignore the first 3 or 4 replies).


So what is the correct answer, & why?

PEMDAS.  Despite knowing this, still very easy to slip up when working one out under the gun.