Virgin points are often the cheapest option for booking Air France or KLM flights. For example, for a trip to Paris I’m planning, I found a great Air France business class award that was available. If I booked through Air France Flying Blue, I’d have to pay 303,000 miles plus $225 per passenger. No thanks! Meanwhile, Virgin Atlantic showed the same flight for 48,500 points plus $281 per passenger. Much better! Exciting right?
The problem comes in after you click through to book the flight… after you enter each passenger’s information… after you enter your credit card details. When you click to actually finalize the booking, the system thinks for a little while then decides “no soup for you!” with a message that says “Sorry, there are no longer seats available on your chosen flight. Please try another search.” The same thing happens via a desktop browser, the cell phone app, and the mobile website. Believe me, I know. I learned this over and over and over.
I know from experience, that some call center reps can push through these bookings and some can’t. The conventional wisdom here is to keep calling until you get a rep that can do it. The problem with that approach is that phone waits can be very, very long. Ask me how I know. Fortunately, there’s an easy work around. Chat.
Problem: Air France & KLM awards can’t be successfully booked online through Virgin Atlantic’s website or app
Here’s a quick summary of the problem: Via Virgin Atlantic’s website or app, you find Air France or KLM awards available and you try to book them. After the final checkout screen, a message pops up saying that something went wrong. Then after a few seconds that’s replaced with “Sorry, there are no longer seats available on your chosen flight. Please try another search. #100503A”
That error message makes it sound like the award space had been gobbled up in the time it took you to book the flight, but if you search again you’ll see that the award space is still there.
Solution: “Need Help? Chat to us”
Virgin Atlantic offers an online chat function. You might not see it on their home page, but if you click through on a desktop browser from their home page to “My booking… Manage booking” (or browse directly to: virginatlantic.com/my-trips/search) you should see a red box in the bottom right corner that says “Need Help? Chat to us.” Click that. If you have any trouble with it not popping up after clicking, try another browser instance.
Now that the chat window is open, your next goal is to get past the automated system to a person who can help.
Here’s a quick path through the prompts to get to a real person:
- Please select from the following options:
Flying Club - What can I help with?
Spending Points - How would you like to use your points? Please select a category below to begin.
Our Partners - Fantastic! Were you looking for information on partner airlines or other partners?
Partner airlines - Did that answer your question?
No - I’m sorry I wasn’t able to resolve this for you at the moment. What would you like to do?
Speak with an advisor
In my case I got a real person online pretty quickly and she was able to help me book the flight without any muss or fuss at all. The entire process from start to finish took about 30 minutes. After I told Nick about this (he was having the same issue with a different booking), he also got his done quickly.
I can’t promise that the first rep you get will be able to help you. But if they can’t, I recommend waiting a bit and trying again and again until you find someone who can.
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