I have about 160K velocity points that I have saved up and never used. Looking for advice on the best way to use these for best discount flights. Wife and I would like to plan a trip to Paris in near future if that’s a possible option? Fine to fly economy
So 160k points for two people is essentially 40,000k points one way per person.
Virgin Australia have two award charts, one for UA/VS/VS flights (which will ignore because they don't help) and one for other partners.
MEL via either SIN/DOH/AUH (SQ/QR or EY) to CDG are all within between 10410 and 10517 miles one way meaning band 12 (the highest) on the award chart:
Use your Velocity Points to fly to over 500 destinations. Check out our flight reward options and turn your Points into a flight for your next trip or dream holiday today
experience.velocityfrequentflyer.com
Noting that anything over 9501 miles is 75,000 points one way so it's clear you won't have enough points (For two economy round trip MEL-CDG tickets you'd need 300,000 points). Now one option is to possibly get one persons flights on SQ/EY/QR on points and then pay cash for the 2nd ticket.
Another is to get creative with some options, JQ/TZ and other airlines fly from MEL to SIN, you can typically get MEL-SIN return for about/under $1k return, you could then book something from Singapore to the middle east in Y on either SQ/QR/EY, this should be 29,800 points per person one way (~119,200 for the two return). This would allow for stop overs in both Asia and the middle east and keep most flight times under 8 hours.
Once in the middle east you should be able to find reasonable flights for the 6 hour leg to Europe (for example I booked Doha to Stockholm in December for ~$400 oneway).
