Virgin Australia Velocity To Reinstate Partner Awards In The Near Future

Good news (at last) for members for members of Virgin Australia’s Velocity program as the airline confirmed that partner award bookings would be making a comeback in the near future.

The airline confirmed to the Executive Traveller that the redemption option to use miles on partner carrier will comeback very soon after it had been pulled back in 2020 before the airline went into administration.

At the present time it won’t matter much as Australians are still unable to travel internationally unless udner special circumstances that rarely apply and most members of Velocity are Australians based on the airlines limited footprint.

That being said there are still quite a few international members that looked at this whole situation with worry as Virgin Australia went bust in the early stages of the pandemic (crazy that we already have September 2021 – time flies).

As the Executive Traveller reported this morning partner award flights will be back very soon.

… Velocity Frequent Flyer is gearing up to re-open international redemption bookings on their partner airlines,” the airline confirmed this morning.

“It’s anticipated that Velocity members who have accumulated a healthy Points balance during the pandemic, will be able to make redemption bookings directly at the Velocity website on a host of international carriers to be announced soon.”

Virgin Australia wasn’t able to confirm to Executive Traveller which of its partners would be the first to come back online for Velocity points-based bookings. …

This would be good because members – especially those who hold Velocity Credit Cards or have transferred balances from other points programs in the past – are likely to sit on some big balances they don’t exactly like to burn for some household items in the shop.

Most prominent partners in the past were certainly Delta, Etihad and Singapore Airlines. As E.T. writes so far there hasn’t been any word on who of these partners will be back and then it still depends on what kind of availability they will receive.

It would be pretty shabby if suddenly Velocity members could only redeem for Economy Class though there’s no indicator that this would be the case.

Conclusion

Virgin Velocity members globally will soon have access to partner award redemptions on other carriers again. Although no specific date or partner has been announced yet you might want to look out over the coming weeks or months what Velocity does on their website.

If redemptions return and remain lucrative in at least some way then members have really dodged a bullet here.