Many Velocity Frequent Flyer members have had their family pooling plans cancelled due to an IT glitch. Affected members may need to take action to get their family pooling setups reinstated.

Numerous AFF members reported receiving emails from Velocity last week, out of the blue, advising them that their family pooling had been cancelled. Some members received multiple emails over a short space of time, leading them to believe their Velocity accounts might have been hacked.

Virgin Australia’s frequent flyer program allows up to 2 adults and 4 children (under 18) from the same family to pool their points and status credits into a single beneficiary’s account. Family pooling is a unique and highly valued benefit of Velocity Frequent Flyer.

Under Velocity’s family pooling rules, family members must be living at the same address to share a Family Pooling scheme. There is also a limit of two adults aged 18 or over. Therefore, it is normal for Virgin to discontinue a family pooling setup if a child turns 18 and there are already 2 adults in the pool, or if someone in the family pool changes their address.

Unfortunately, Velocity Frequent Flyer appears to have automatically cancelled the family pooling setups of thousands of members who had more than one address listed on their account. This happened due to a system error last week.

For example, some Velocity members have a primary home address and a secondary work or mailing address listed on their Velocity account. The system seems to have picked up the second address as being different to the home address of the other members of the pool, and therefore cancelled the pool.

How to get your family pooling reinstated

Velocity is aware of the error and is working to resolve it. Velocity members impacted by this have been advised to contact the Velocity Membership Contact Centre on 13 18 75 to get their family pooling reinstated.

Unfortunately for impacted members, it appears that Velocity will not automatically reinstate family pooling accounts cancelled due to this error. This is a manual process. If you don’t take any action, you may not get your family pooling benefits back.

When you call up, the Velocity call centre will probably reassign your primary address (so it’s the same as the primary address used by the other members of the pool) and delete any other addresses associated with your account. You’ll then need to wait until the next day and then manually set up family pooling again.

In our view, while it’s not great that this error has occurred in the first place, it’s especially not great that the solution requires members to actively contact Velocity and potentially waste a lot of their valuable time.

Matt Graham

The editor of Australian Frequent Flyer, Matt's passion for travel has taken him to over 90 countries… with the help of frequent flyer points, of course!
Matt's favourite destinations (so far) are Germany, Brazil & Kazakhstan. His interests include aviation, economics & foreign languages, and he has a soft spot for good food and red wine.

You can connect with Matt by posting on the Australian Frequent Flyer community forum and tagging @AFF Editor.