Virgin Atlantic joined Skyteam two years ago and has been very proactive in integration with its partners. In terms of award tickets, to date you can already redeem tickets online for all partners except China Eastern and China Airlines, and that includes a couple of non-Skyteam airlines: El Al and Latam.
Award pricing is very attractive for short- and medium-haul flights.
The main nuisance lies in their terrible web UI. Other problems aside, the search engine supports very limited airports, making it very difficult to locate partner routes. The app isn’t much better either.
To work around it, you can actually enter the following URL directly (log-in required):
The URL above is a search for Shanghai (PVG) to Shenyang (SHE) departing May 13, 2025, one adult. You can change the respective field to search for something else.
The URL for a return flight looks like the following:
You repeat origin, destination and departing twice. You can actually manipulate it to search for a multi-city or open-jaw itinerary instead of return.
Remember that Virgin now charges a hefty £70 / $100 award ticket change or cancellation fee, so it might make more sense to book a return than two single tickets. In practice however, I hear that they will just forfeit the taxes and fees paid if it is lower than £70 / $100.
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