[Update: Devaluation Partially Rolled Back, New Sweet Spots Remain!] Virgin Atlantic’s New Delta Distance Based Award Chart: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

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Update, 1/11: Virgin has rolled back their devaluation on nonstop Delta flights to Europe. These flights will now price according to the old award calendar in the original post below. Flights to elsewhere in the world will use the new award calendar in the original post below.

Fuel surcharges will still only apply for Delta flights from the US to the UK and not on Delta from the US to anywhere else in the world.

This is excellent news as it preserves the new Delta short-haul bargains and it brings back long-haul business class values to Europe.

For example the JFK-Paris business class flight that had increased from 50K to 80K miles is back down to 50K miles!

And the JFK-Milan business class flight that had increased from 50K to 100K miles is back down to 50K miles!

On the other hand, coach awards to Paris have gone up from 22.5K under the new chart to 30K under the revived old chart. However you can always fly on another partner like Air France for just 12K miles with some fuel surcharges:

Originally posted on 1/1:

Virgin Atlantic has moved from a region based award chart for Delta flights to a distance based award chart.

Here is the old region based award chart with round-trip pricing:

Here is the new distance based award chart with 9 zones of one-way, per segment pricing:

You can check what a ticket will cost by checking the distance between city pairs on GCmap.com.

Note that flights to/from London are excluded from these changes. Those flights are also hit with fuel surcharges, while other Delta flights are not.

There’s plenty of good, bad, and ugly to go around here.

The great:

Infant lap child awards on international flights are a bargain. While Delta charges 10% of the paid fare, which can be astronomical on one-way flights, Virgin charges just 1,000 miles in coach or 5,000 miles in business class each way:

The good:

If I want to fly from Cleveland to NYC, Delta charges a variable amount of miles. For example on 2/3/21 it would cost 11.5K miles one way:

With Virgin Atlantic this is a zone 1 award as the flight distance between Cleveland and LaGuardia is under 500 miles.

With Virgin Atlantic miles there’s plenty of zone 1 awards available for just 7.5K miles, though Delta blocks this partner award availability close-in to the flight. This used to cost 12.5K Virgin miles under the old region based award chart.

Virgin even counts Detroit to NYC as a zone 1 award, despite being slightly above 500 miles in distance:

JFK to Tel Aviv used to cost 40K miles under the old award chart, now it’s 35K miles each way as a zone 8 award:

Delta charges a premium for one-way awards, in this case they wanted 100K miles, though a round-trip is available for 74K miles.

JFK to Paris is 35K Delta miles:

But is just 22.5K Virgin Atlantic miles as a zone 6 award under the distance based chart. This used to cost 30K miles under the region based award chart:

The bad:

Similar to BA Avios, you now have to pay for each segment separately.

That means if I want to fly from Cleveland to Tel Aviv via JFK, it will now cost 42.5K miles (35K for JFK-TLV+7.5K for CLE-JFK) instead of the 40K it cost under the region based award chart:

The ugly:

Delta is very stingy about releasing business class award space to partner airlines, but rates have gone way up here.

The US to Europe in business class used to be just 50,000 miles one-way.

Now a flight like JFK to Milan skyrockets to 105K miles one-way as a zone 8 award:

And yet, it’s still less than the 170K that Delta wanted:

A flight like JFK to Paris goes from 50K to 80K Virgin miles one-way as a zone 6 award:

Which is still a bargain compared to Delta miles one-way, but less so than before:

What do you think of these changes?

HT: bmw, via DDF and justmeha