Virgin Australia Velocity Claims Mistake In Fake ‘Billion Miles Giveaway’ – But Was It Really?

Virgin Australia Velocity sent out an email to their members yesterday advertising a ‘Billion Miles Giveaway‘ which wasn’t only false advertisement but now they even sent a strange follow up claiming error.

In fact they are not giving anything away as the Billion Miles are coming out of a transfer bonus when members transfer their credit card or shopping points into Velocity.

The entire way this promotion is advertised is just bizarre to say the least. Not sure how you can call a transfer bonus promotion a giveaway but that’s exactly how they worded it.

Velocity partners with 16 banking and shopping partners to move loyalty points collected with these partners to the Velocity account and in the process earn a 15% bonus amount (very low actually).

Giveaway suggests something will be ‘given away’ for free without any investment or purchase which really isn’t the case here as you first have to give away the points.

And then today, this arrived just a couple hours ago:

Last night you got an email about our 1 Billion Point Giveaway. That’s nine zeros. Three more than we were supposed to give away. But we can’t take it back now, so you might as well make the most of it.

Claim your share, with 15% bonus Velocity Points when you move your eligible credit card or flybuys reward points to Velocity before 31 May 2017*. We really should have made it harder to claim. …

And just for convenience they already had a video ready to illustrate the matter.

Weirdest run campaign ever in my opinion. A big booha about nothing but a measly 15% credit card points conversion bonus. They really squeeze every bit out of it, I have to give them that.

Conclusion

It’s pretty obvious that this entire thing was pre-planned and pretty dishonest to advertise it this way claiming an error. It also doesn’t make sense for a multitude of reasons. It’s not a simple fat finger mistake where someone adds a zero when you create graphics where you actually spell out BILLION.

And apart from that it makes zero sense either to cap such a promotion with a million or even a few million miles. Why? Well just do the math. A customer transfers 200,000 points and receives 30,000 points bonus. 30k for just ONE customer. For how many customers was the promotion originally designed then? Utter nonsense.