Vegas Trip Information for anyone looking to go this year.

[redsimon]

http://www.headforpoints.com/2016/02/12/virgin-flying-club-miles-booster-buy-points-bonus/

The second offer, ‘Miles Booster’, IS a potentially very good deal.

Miles Booster only works if you have a Virgin Atlantic cash or reward flight booked or have taken one in the last six months. You are able to buy an additional 200% of the base miles you will earn from the flight for just 1p each.

Click here for details. If you have a New York economy flight booked, for example, you would earn 6,916 base miles from your trip.

Miles Booster allows you to buy up to 13,832 additional miles for just 1p. Plus, with this promotion, you would get an extra 30% bonus as well.

If you maximised the Miles Booster option for your New York flight, you would be able to buy a total of 17,981 Virgin Flying Club miles for just £138.32. That is 0.77p each, which is well worth considering.

You can retrospectively buy miles via Miles Booster for any Virgin Atlantic flights taken in the last six months, cash or reward. Even if you don’t have any current bookings, you may be able to take advantage of this.  At this price, I would consider it if you know that you will be using them in short or medium term.

Has anyone done the miles boost?

I booked a reward flight on Saturday for 12 June. Went onto flying club site but couldn't see the link to boost.

Tried ringing VA and after 20 minutes of trying to get it done manually with two different cards the assistant gave up and "referred it to tech support" !

[Graham C]

Booked flights over the phone for our summer trip and did the miles boost when I booked.  It all went through smoothly and seemed too good to turn down.

[redsimon]

Anyone got an idiots guide on how to buy the miles boost online?

[tonytats]

Buy your miles and when they hit your account they are boosted by 20% ?
Mine show as seperate transactions miles  added from tesco then boosted by virgin

[redsimon]

Found it under "Treat yourself" in the manage booking page

[Simon Galloway]

I've always been able to do it at the time of booking, to retro-add it, pretty sure you are going to have to get them on the phone.  You can miles boost, or double miles boost (or they were the options last time) so it is a simple maths solution to see if you would be better off taking the double boost or declining the double boost and buying the equivalent # of miles from the normal Buy Miles function with the current 30% bonus

[bobAlike]

I've collected over 100k amex points over the last year, any idea if its worth converting them to air miles or what they might be worth? I'm going to LV in October and not booked yet so looking for the best option. Cheers.

[Simon Galloway]

I might be out of date on it, don't have any reason to keep up to date.  Would I be right in thinking you could get 100k avios or 100k flying club miles?  So if the BA prices for reward seats are unchanged, you can choose between Club World on BA or Upper on Virgin.  For me, that would be Upper on Virgin ainec.

Your 100k gets you a return in Upper and you get left with a £500 tax/surcharge bill.  As you are going to Vegas, that has to be pretty sweet if the dates are do-able.

I'm sure there are a bunch of other things you could buy with the miles instead, a zillion nectar points or 27 cases of wine or whatever.  It boils down to how much value you place on an upgraded cabin.  You could take the chance to go Upper, you could just pay a cash fare and use your points for something else, or if you are ready to book, you could use 29,750 miles to get an economy ticket and have enough points left over to do something else with.

my 2 cents would be I'd just take the Upper return and smile.

[Longines]

Converting Amex Membership Rewards into hotel points can often be decent value, I got a week in a family suite in NYC for roughly 50k MR points this summer, don't know if there are Hilton or Carlson properties in LV: http://www.headforpoints.com/2015/08/03/how-use-american-express-membership-rewards-points/

Virgin have made two changes recently that might be of interest - the number of miles required for an upgrade has gone up but the economy fare codes that are upgradable have been improved, so cheaper tickets are now also upgradeable. More details here: http://www.headforpoints.com/2016/02/23/virgin-atlantic-increases-miles-for-upgrades/

[Simon Galloway]

Just a random observation, got an email from Tesco, get pet insurance and receive 4000 tesco clubcard points.  Haven't spent too much time on it as I have no intention of doing it, but for those that this sort of thing appeals to, I think that's something like 10k virgin miles when converted, which is about £150 worth.  Pretty sure you could insure a fake tiddles for less than that... but who knows.

[KarmaDope]

X-posting from WSOP thread:

Kenny Halleart over on 2p2 has released the link to his famous spreadsheet detailing all of the series.

Only WSOP so far but posting for bookmarking.

http://bitly.com/WSOP2016

[bobAlike]

I might be out of date on it, don't have any reason to keep up to date.  Would I be right in thinking you could get 100k avios or 100k flying club miles?  So if the BA prices for reward seats are unchanged, you can choose between Club World on BA or Upper on Virgin.  For me, that would be Upper on Virgin ainec.

Your 100k gets you a return in Upper and you get left with a £500 tax/surcharge bill.  As you are going to Vegas, that has to be pretty sweet if the dates are do-able.

I'm sure there are a bunch of other things you could buy with the miles instead, a zillion nectar points or 27 cases of wine or whatever.  It boils down to how much value you place on an upgraded cabin.  You could take the chance to go Upper, you could just pay a cash fare and use your points for something else, or if you are ready to book, you could use 29,750 miles to get an economy ticket and have enough points left over to do something else with.

my 2 cents would be I'd just take the Upper return and smile.

Thanks Simon, that would be my choice too.

[cambridgealex]

Anyone had any experience using Airbnb in Vegas? Some nice looking places at very decent prices near the Rio.

Flights from London best part of £1100 atm :/ Is there an easter sale on usually or something? Usually got it booked up by now...

[Marky147]

No experience with AirBnB, but I think Woodsey has used them in the past.

Miles sale with Virgin atm, so you can get cheap flights with them.

Post from Simon a few pages back explaining it all in detail, but pretty easy to get out there for about £5/600 with them.

[KarmaDope]

And if you can't do the mileage trick, fly from Dublin and have a night on the town beforehand.