Virgin Australia only flies to a handful of overseas destinations like Bali, Queenstown, Fiji, Samoa and Vanuatu. If you want to use your Velocity benefits flying anywhere else outside of Australia, you’ll need to use one of Virgin Australia’s partner airlines.
This arrangement works moderately well for Velocity Frequent Flyer members. You can earn and redeem Velocity points on some useful international partners like Singapore Airlines, Qatar Airways and United. Most of Virgin’s partner airlines also provide selected status benefits to Velocity Silver, Gold and Platinum members.
Unfortunately, the travel experience isn’t always that seamless when booking a flight operated by one of Virgin’s partner airlines through Virgin Australia, as a codeshare with a “VA” flight number…
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Virgin Australia wants you to book the VA flight number
Currently, it’s fairly easy for Velocity members to avoid having to book Virgin Australia marketed codeshare flights operated by partner airlines. You can just book directly with the partner airline, quote your Velocity number, and earn (more or less) the same amount of Velocity points and status credits that you would on the VA flight number.
But when the upcoming Velocity Frequent Flyer program changes take effect in October 2025, Velocity will require its members to earn at least 50% of the required status credits to earn or retain status from VA marketed flights. At the same time, Velocity will reduce the rates of status credits earned on flights marketed by partner airlines.
This is clearly designed to encourage Velocity members flying to overseas destinations not served by Virgin Australia (i.e. most of them) to book on the Virgin Australia codeshare.
Virgin Australia sells VA-marketed codeshare flights on selected routes operated by the following partner airlines:
- Qatar Airways
- Singapore Airlines
- United Airlines
- Air Canada
- Air New Zealand
- All Nippon Airways (ANA)
- Link Airways
Problems with booking VA marketed codeshare flights
In some cases, it makes very little difference whether you book through Virgin Australia or directly with the operating airline. That’s the ideal scenario. Unfortunately, this seems to be the exception, rather than the rule.
Often, booking a VA codeshare flight operated by another airline results in paying more to get a less seamless travel experience.
Here are a few examples of this…
Huge price differences
When booking a codeshare flight on the Virgin Australia website, you’ll often pay a lot more than you would booking directly with the operating airline for a seat on the exact same aircraft.
We’re not just talking about a few dollars here and there. In some cases, the price difference runs into the thousands of dollars.
For example, at the time we checked, ANA was selling return Economy Class tickets from Sydney to Tokyo on the following flights for $1,650 return:
You could book the same flights on the Virgin Australia website. You’d just have to pay an extra $281 per person (and give up your ability to choose a seat, but more on that later)…
Here’s another example. These Singapore Airlines Economy Class flights between Sydney and Singapore cost $1,170 on the Singapore Airlines website:
The lowest price to book the exact same flights through Virgin Australia would be $2,205. That’s a difference of more than $1,000. In this case, it’s because Virgin is only selling Flex tickets on the return leg.
Business Class fares aren’t immune from the price discrepancies. For example, these return Singapore Airlines Business Class flights from Melbourne to Singapore would cost $3,966 if you booked directly with Singapore Airlines:
The same flights would cost $4,435 return if booking the VA codeshares on the same flights:
But one of the most egregious examples we found – and we didn’t have to look far – was with Air Canada. On the dates we checked, Air Canada’s website was charging around $2,790 for a return Economy Standard flight from Brisbane to Vancouver. (This is an Air Canada fare type that includes checked baggage.)
Meanwhile, Virgin Australia was charging $4,051 for exactly the same flights from Brisbane to Vancouver on Air Canada:
If you wanted to take your family of four to Canada, you’d pay $5,045 more to book the VA codeshare. Why would you bother?!
Why such big price differences?
I’m not suggesting that Virgin Australia is intentionally adding such huge mark-ups to these codeshare flights. It could well be an IT issue. Either way, the end result is that the codeshare flights can cost a lot more.
The ACCC has authorised Virgin Australia to replicate partner airline pricing with Qatar Airways, United Airlines, Singapore Airlines, Air New Zealand and Air Canada. A spokesperson told Australian Frequent Flyer that this was indeed Virgin’s intention when selling codeshare tickets on those airlines.
“Our intention with these partners is to ensure the same price-point is available to customers across all channels, whether they choose to book on Virgin Australia’s website or through its partner airline’s channels,” the Virgin Australia spokesperson said.
“Occasionally, price variations may be caused through inventory being sold under different fare brands and delays in synchronisation between Virgin Australia and partner booking and scheduling systems.”
Unable to select seats on some airlines
When booking VA-coded flights operated by Qatar Airways, United, Air Canada, Air New Zealand or Link Airways, you should be able to choose a seat directly with the partner airline. But this isn’t necessarily a seamless experience.
To choose a seat when flying Qatar Airways (including if you’re on a “Virgin Australia” flight to Doha), you have to call Qatar Airways. Similarly, you would need to call Singapore Airlines to select seats on flights operated by that airline.
Unfortunately, it’s not generally possible to select a seat in advance at all when flying on a VA codeshare flight operated by ANA.
On a long-haul flight, most frequent flyers consider seat selection to be extremely important. Without the ability to choose a seat in advance, you might get stuck in a middle seat all the way to Tokyo.
Numerous AFF members have encountered this problem when booking ANA flights through Virgin. Here’s what two of them had to say…
Neither ANA or VA give consistent information. I’ve called both a few times and each agent gives a conflicting answer to my questions. If I’d have know how bad it was, I’d have avoided flying on a code share. It’s been my worst experience with VA ever.
Yep there is zero reason to book an ANA flight through Virgin. I’m star alliance gold, couldn’t select seats until check in, had the worst seats on the plane. Called Virgin, they said call ANA. Called ANA, they said call virgin. If both call centres didn’t have really bad hold times, I’d probably try to get them on a 3-way call and let them argue it out.
There is a workaround to this problem, which madrooster has detailed on the AFF forum, but it’s not simple.
“Virgin Australia is continually exploring ways to improve the experience of its customers booking partner flights. Seat selection is one area that we continue to work on together with partners,” Virgin’s spokesperson told us.
Not possible to book Premium Economy or First Class
Most of Virgin Australia’s codeshare partners have Premium Economy on their flights to Australia, and some even offer First Class. But you cannot book any of those seats on the VA flight number.
Virgin exclusively sells Economy Choice, Economy Flex and Business Class tickets as codeshares – much to the frustration of some frequent flyers.
“Virgin Australia does not operate Premium Economy or First Class cabins, so currently these fare classes cannot be booked on Virgin Australia codeshare flights. However, Virgin Australia continues to explore opportunities to better provide access to all partner airline offerings,” the airline told us.
Fewer flight options
On some codeshare routes, there are simply fewer flight options available to book on the Virgin Australia website, compared to booking direct with the operating airline.
For example, Singapore Airlines offers Business Class on five daily flights from Singapore to Melbourne:
When booking on the Virgin Australia website, for this particular travel date, we could only see availability in Business on 3 out of the 5 return flights that Singapore Airlines itself was offering on the same day:
When searching for flights from Brisbane to Vancouver, we also found an example where the Virgin Australia website was only offering connections via Sydney. This was despite Air Canada itself selling a direct Brisbane-Vancouver service on the same day.
Huge problems like this with the VA booking system, always has been. Can’t book flights to many destinations, you can’t even search for Dubai!
I think it’s ridiculous they expect Lifetime Gold to have 75% of our credits on VA flights when you can’t even book the flights you want as VA tickets (and have never been able to!).
Incorrect flight times displayed
While researching for this article, we even found an example where the Virgin Australia website was showing incorrect departure and arrival times for a codeshare flight operated by Air Canada.
Virgin Australia corrected this error after we alerted them to it.
Response from Virgin Australia
We put all of the above issues to Virgin Australia. A spokesperson acknowledged that there can sometimes be technical issues affecting codeshare flights.
“Our objective is to offer customers a seamless experience from the booking phase to landing at their destination,” a Virgin Australia spokesperson said.
“As our partner airlines offer different fare products and services, there can be discrepancies due to the synchronisation between booking and scheduling systems that is required.”
Despite this, Virgin Australia is persisting with its new status requirement to earn at least 50% of required status credits on VA-marketed flights.
This probably won’t be too much of a problem for the many Velocity members who mainly fly Virgin Australia domestically. But if you regularly fly overseas, this change just makes Qantas Frequent Flyer even more compelling. Compared to Velocity, anyway.
