And of course, you can always call the Flying Club team to book for other partners, with the exception of China Eastern – the integration was “coming soon” before the Chinese New Year in February, but that news seems to have disappeared into thin air somehow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One main complaint that I’ve heard from a few friends and readers however, is that Virgin Atlantic’s partner inventory is full of phantom seats. You see tickets available and go all the way till making payment, only to be presented with the following error message:<\/p>\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.verylvke.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2024\/05\/virgin-atlantic-phantom-seat.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe pop-up suggests that the ticket was just snatched up by someone else, except it isn’t. Those seats keep hanging around in Virgin’s system and it happens way too often. I was caught up in this puzzle when looking for MEA tickets recently and became very frustrated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One thing that eventually helped me was to cross check with Delta, as the latter has much more accurate data. The flight I was looking for was from Paris to Beirut around Christmas – Virgin claims award availability on every day<\/strong> in that period, which seems too good to be true.<\/p>\n\n\n