A few weeks ago Virgin Australia announced services to and from Melbourne and Hong Kong. The service will be operated by their A330-200 aircraft and it features’s their brilliant Business Class product.

If you’ve not seen what the product is like on the A330, I’ve reviewed it here.

Virgin Australia New Business Class

The flight has been on sale for a few weeks now but there’s a bit of confusion when it comes to booking award seats on the route. When searching for award seats the website will only show full priced awards which are very steeply priced.

If you keep looking online you’ll keep getting annoyed as you won’t see any saver rewards, only full fare redemptions.

So how do I find a Saver redemption?

At the moment, the Virgin Australia website won’t show seats available but there is a way to find space. For the time being, you’ll need to use a program like Expertflyer.

You’ll need to look for the fare codes X and Z. X is the code for an Economy award and Z is the code for a Business reward.

Once you find space and are ready to book, you’ll need to call Velocity. If you’re calling Velocity from Australia the phone number is 13 18 75, if calling from New Zealand the number is 0800 230 875 and if you’re calling from any other country, the phone number is +61 2 8667 5924.

From what I’ve found, the availability on the route is fantastic! Almost every day I could find at least 2 seats in Business and quite a few in Economy.

How many points do the flights cost?

If you’re wanting to redeem Velocity points for the flights, it’ll cost you 27,800 points for a one-way Economy Class fare or 59,500 points for a one-way Business Class fare. As for taxes, they are $79.95 AUD.

You can also use Singapore Airlines Krisflyer miles for the flights. It’ll cost you 26,000 points for a one-way Economy Class fare or 54,000 points for a one-way Business Class fare.