Travel Bank Fare vs Revenue Fare

[OrangeRoughie]

Has anyone noticed any price discrepancies when searching revenue fares and then searching using travel bank credit? If so, have you had any luck calling up and having them honour revenue fare with travel bank credit? Cheers

 

[AIRwin]

Is it a Future Flight Credit?

 

[OrangeRoughie]

Is it a Future Flight Credit?

It is, yes.

 

[AIRwin]

Bookings using your Future Flight credits are subject to seat availability within the fare class available for Future Flight credits on your selected flight. It’s possible that the seats reserved for Future Flight credits may be sold out for the flight you’ve chosen.

Future Flight Credits | Coronavirus Customer Hub

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travel.virginaustralia.com

 

[henrus]

So I have an answer for that specific flight/route.

There is a special seat availability to use with the future flight credits (only a fixed amount per flight) but two allocations exist - one for economy and one for business class. On the specific flight the allocation of economy seats has been used up already and so the price of $499 you're seeing is actually a business class fare.

 

[OrangeRoughie]

Bookings using your Future Flight credits are subject to seat availability within the fare class available for Future Flight credits on your selected flight.

Ok, thanks for that - makes more sense.
When I did the same search ADL-BNK there was no difference in pricing when I had selected use FFC vs not which is what threw me on this search.

Post automatically merged: Jan 17, 2021

So I have an answer for that specific flight/route.

There is a special seat availability to use with the future flight credits (only a fixed amount per flight) but two allocations exist - one for economy and one for business class. On the specific flight the allocation of economy seats has been used up already and so the price of $499 you're seeing is actually a business class fare.

Great insight, thanks very much!

 

[henrus]

Realised my initial explanation wasn't very good so to provide a bit more detail.

Normal revenue fares just pull from any available fares. For VA1447 on 17/04 the following shows up:

There are 6 E fares available at $299 which is what you see in the revenue search.

When using a Virgin future flight credit there needs availability in either U class (for Economy) or I fares (for Business). The I fares are directly tied to Business saver fares so if a business saver revenue fare can be booked then it can also be booked using a future flight credit.

The Economy fares are a bit more confusing as you need availability in both U class (a fare class not directly tied to anything but instead used to control the number of future fare credit bookings) and a regular class (any of the following below). It's the combination of needing any of the below and the U class that allows them to control the number of bookings using future flight credits on a specific flight.



With the I fares (business class) the most ever released is 4 (unless it's manually overridden) whereas the U fares depend but from what I've seen there are always at least 9 fares.

A free and good tool to search fares is the BCD travel website:

Travel tools

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flightavailability.bcdtravel.com