Earlier this year, Virgin Australia and ANA launched an expanded partnership. While this offered Velocity members the ability to earn points and status credits on eligible ANA flights, the ability to redeem points was still to come.
Now, the time has come and Velocity members can now book ANA flights using their Velocity Points. This complements the previously announced ability to earn points on ANA.
Booking ANA Reward seats
There is a downside to booking ANA Rewards seats. Unfortunately, at this time, there is no way of booking the seats online. You need to go through the Membership Contact Centre in order to make a booking. The problem is that this means that you can’t spend time online looking for options, you have to get on the phone. Having said that, you can try checking for availability on another airline before calling.
That said, the number of points required for a redemption are the same as for other partners. That is, ANA is on the same redemption table as Singapore Airlines, Qatar Airways, and Air Canada.
As an example, on the forthcoming flights from Perth to Tokyo, you would need 42,000 points in Economy. Move forward to Business, and you are looking at redeeming 78,000 points.
Final Words
It’s good to see the partnership continuing to expand. As yet, the partnership does not provide reciprocal lounge access, but we can hope that they are working on it. As an aside, I would say that international lounge access generally needs to be looked at.