Earn Virgin Status Credits for Distance Flown with This Trick

Earlier this year, Velocity Frequent Flyer changed how it awards status credits for Virgin Australia flights. Instead of a fixed amount of status credits based on the fare type and distance flown, Velocity now gives status credits based on the cost of your airfare.

While this change does suit some people flying on more expensive tickets, not everyone’s a fan. Ultimately, it makes it harder to “game” the Velocity program by earning “cheap” status credits. But there’s a little-known trick you can use to continue earning status credits on Virgin Australia domestic and short-haul international flights based on the distance you fly, instead of the amount spent.

Earn status credits with Virgin Australia Holidays

After shutting down during the COVID-19 pandemic, Virgin Australia Holidays has relaunched in partnership with Hopper, which operates Virgin’s hotel booking portal.

As flagged by kallinch on the AFF forum, you can now book flight and hotel packages on the Virgin Australia Holidays website. To make a holiday booking, you’d need to book a return flight combined with a hotel booking covering the stay at your destination.

You can book for 1-6 people, and Virgin Australia Holidays gives you the option to fly Economy or Business Class. If you book Economy, your flights will be on an Economy Choice fare.

The interesting part about this is that Virgin Australia domestic and short-haul international flights booked as part of a holiday package earn Velocity status credits based on the distance and travel class. This is how Velocity used to award status credits before the April 2025 changes – though the exact number of status credits earned isn’t identical.

The rate at which you’ll earn status credits for these flights is the same as the rate applicable to “Virgin Australia flights booked on the same itinerary as other airlines”. Here’s the earning table:

You earn fewer points on holiday packages

You can also earn Velocity Points when booking a Virgin Australia Holidays flight & hotel package. However, you’ll earn 3 points per $1 spent – plus any status bonuses, if applicable.

This is the same earn rate that applies to hotel bookings made through Virgin Australia. But it’s less than the 4 Velocity Points per dollar you’d normally earn when booking Virgin Australia flights (or 5 points per dollar if you have a Velocity credit card).

The trade-off is that, in some cases, you could earn significantly more status credits when booking flights as part of a holiday package! This won’t always be the case, but it could be if you’re clever about it. 😉

Let’s look at an example…

One of the best Virgin Australia status runs under Velocity’s old earning system was Canberra-Melbourne-Adelaide in Business Class.

Under the new earning system, where you earn 1 status credit per $12 spent, you’d earn 34 status credits for a one-way Canberra-Melbourne-Adelaide Business itinerary costing $403.24 (the current D class price if you book at least 28 days in advance).

But if you book Business flights through Virgin Australia Holidays, you’ll earn 40 status credits for each of the two sectors. Thats’s 80 in total, in each direction.

When you book your holiday, you first need to select your hotel at the destination:

You can then choose your preferred flights:

In this example, you’d pay $886.05 for return Business flights from Canberra to Adelaide (via Melbourne) and a night at the Grand Chancellor hotel in Adelaide.

This itinerary would earn you 160 status credits, which is an earn rate of $5.54 per status credit. That’s less than half the cost of status credits under the normal system!

These holiday packages may even save you money

In the above example, the return flights would have cost $806.48 if booked on a standalone ticket:

And if booked separately, a night at the Grand Chancellor would have cost $157:

In total, that would have come to a cost of $963.48. The cost of the holiday package, which has identical inclusions, is $77 less.

Is this always a good deal?

There are also plenty of examples of flights where booking as part of a holiday package would earn you fewer status credits (and fewer points). This could be the case if the airfare is quite high.

But if you do your research and plan your trip carefully, you could manage to earn Virgin status credits for significantly less than $12 each using this trick. And since these are Virgin Australia flights, we’d assume they would count towards the new Velocity status requirement to earn at least 50% of your status credits from VA flights.

Essentially, this trick makes Velocity “status runs” – where you can choose your flights carefully to optimise your status credit earn rate – viable again. That’s not just good news for Velocity members, but could also be a good thing for Velocity in the long run as it could re-engage members who recently gave up on earning status under the new program.