Hi all,
A bit of a heads up.
I was just informed by a Sydney lounge staff member that VA will be charging the fare difference if you are booked in Saver Lite or Saver fares and want to fly ahead. She told me that VA is planning on introducing this in the next couple of months.
This was one of the "real" benefits of VFF's platinum and gold memberships.
As far as I was concerned, Fly Ahead was something you could do on both airlines. It's just that Virgin decided to put it into writing, so there's a bit more solid basis.
I would be surprised if Platinums could not continue to do this without charge, if there is even going to be such a change at all.
Should be noted too that even if you could find a fare in the same fare bucket, since fare buckets may change in value, technically you could still be up for a fare difference if it were strictly enforced.
What will be interesting is to see how and when these "changes" are communicated. Though as
drewbles pointed out, this is not necessarily a change according to the rules, ergo there is no "material devaluation" as it were that meant you would need to give 3 or 6 months notice. Who knows - they may decide not to go through with this change at all.
Wonder if (when) QF will follow... I have had zero issues flying ahead on QF at no cost on every flight that I have wanted to...
QF have been offering fly ahead at no charge as long as I can remember so it must work for the Airlines as they clear the customers on cheaper flights and free up peek hour flights for higher paying customers who book last minute.
QF never had such a "benefit". It was never written into the rules as such. You can ask nicely and a QF staff member will see what they can do. It works better during peak travel and flow forwarding (as
serfty describes it, in these times the airline sees just a huge allotment of seats rather than a bunch of flights with a discrete number of seats each). One nice thing is that if you ask at a Service Desk, island or use a kiosk, you can shift to an earlier flight even if you are checking a bag. (I'm sure VA would have a similar thing with discretion).
Certainly at times I haven't been able to get an earlier flight when I'd like to; conversely, there are times when I've been proactively offered an earlier flight (or even a direct one), and in some cases unfortunately had to / wanted to refuse! (Got lucky one time in that I was both shifted to an earlier flight and operationally upgraded at the same time
)