In December last year, Virgin Australia and Air Canada announced a new partnership under which they would codeshare on each other services. In addition, they announced their intention to offer recipricol frequent flyer benefits.
Five months later, Virgin Australia and Air Canada have now launched their initial codeshare flights. Under the codeshare agreement, the two airlines will place their code on a limited number of flights of the other.
In the case of Virgin Australia, the VA code will be placed on flights from Los Angeles to Calgary, Montreal and Toronto. It seems a little odd that Vancouver is missing from the list, but I am sure they have their reasons.
In return, Air Canada has added its AC airline code on selected Virgin Australia flights. These include flights from from Sydney and Brisbane to 10 destinations across Australia and New Zealand, including Adelaide, Canberra, Cairns, the Gold Coast, Melbourne, Perth, Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington.
Virgin Australia says that it commenced selling the codeshares on Friday for travel from June 1 2017.
Velocity Earn on Air Canada
Under the codeshare agreement, members of Velocity will be able to earn points when using the Air Canada codeshares. In an unusual exception, the statement from Virgin states that Status Credits will not be earned on flights operated by Air Canada.
Future Plans
This intial codeshare flights represent the first phase of their agreement. It does not, however, extend to Frequent Flyer benefits. At this stage, the airlines state that they intend to offer reciprocal frequent flyer redemption benefits on each other’s flights in a subsequent stage of the agreement. Further details on this is expected to be made available later this year.
In terms of additional codeshares, Virgin Australia will be placing its code on Air Canada flights between Vancouver and Australia. These flights run from Brisbane and Sydney to Vancouver year round. Air Canada is also planning a seasonal Melbourne to Vancouver service.