I'm not surprised to report this given the hiccups that too often arise with VA's international partners combined with how things tend to operate generally in South Africa, but while visiting some family a few months ago, I was unable to input my VA frequent flyer number in my South African Airways reservation. Online check-in randomly didn't work at all. The woman at the airport claimed to have managed it, but it wasn't appearing on the mobile boarding pass (didn't have a paper one) and the lounge in Joburg had no idea whatsoever that VA even existed, and if the partnership is in a handbook somewhere, a copy wasn't to be found (or looked for). I was let into the lounge after some persistence, but points didn't credit.
Three weeks later when flying back to Australia, I discovered during check-in (this time it worked online) that their system has Virgin Atlantic but not
Virgin Australia as an option. This is rather odd as Virgin Atlantic is not a partner of SAA... perhaps they were at some point, but otherwise my assumption is whoever set up the system simply didn't know what they were doing and put in Virgin Atlantic as the option. The woman at check-in said there was no way to put in VA, and when I asked for a boarding pass this time on paper, sure enough it shows VS rather than VA as the code with my Velocity number.
I was denied entry into the lounge, this time with the agent making a point of saying that there'd been "confusion and communication amongst staff" leading to a "message from the airline" reiterating that entry for VA is not permitted. (Was I really the prompt for that?
) I have Priority Pass so went elsewhere without a fuss as it was clear the Cape Town crowd weren't interested in having a chat about it.
Points never did credit (obviously, if they went to Virgin Atlantic who of course wouldn't do anything with them) and it's been nearly 6 weeks that my missing points claims remain "pending."
Who needs an alliance when you have patchwork partnerships your partners don't know about, right?