If you are a little short on Velocity Points for an award, Velocity may have an offer of interest. Velocity are offering a 15% discount on the purchase price of points through to the end of April.
The discount is being offered through their Velocity Points Booster offer. This allows you to buy up to 50% of your points balance twice each year.
Velocity Points Booster
If you’re a little short on Velocity Points for an Virgin Australia or partner award you are now able to buy the points online. While the ability to buy top up points is not new, Velocity have made some changes to the process of buying them.
First up, you can now buy the points online, rather than needing to do it over the phone.This means you can easily buy top up points at any time of day, as long as you are online.
Secondly, they have changed how the limit to the number of points you can purchase is applied. This is now tied to your existing balance, rather than to the award you have in mind.
Buying Velocity Points
Velocity have moved to selling the points online, and is now done through Points.com. Points.com run the points sales process for a number of other loyalty programs.
You can purchase points in blocks of 500 points, up to a maximum of 50,000 points (which will cost you $1,172. You are limited to buying 50% of your current account balance. This means that if you need to buy 50,000 points, you will need to have at least 100,000 points in your Velocity account already.
Effectively this means that you can now purchase up to 1/3 of the points required for an award. For example, let us suppose you need 90,000 points for an award. If you have 60,000 points in your account, you can go ahead an purchase the other 30,000 points.
Previously, you needed to have 80% of the award amount, and could purchase the extra 20%. As a result, the new rules allow you to purchase a greater percentage of the award. You are still limited to 2 purchases of top up points per year.
The points are no cheaper than they were before. You should probably consider other ways of gaining any shortfall in points first. However, as a back up option, if all else fails, it is there if you need it.
Qantas have a similar top up offer, which I have previously compared side by side with the Velocity program.
