Skip to content
Go to Home Page
News

Virgin Atlantic Fuel Surcharges on Delta-Operated Flights Are Gone

Darren Murph
Articles
Darren Murph holds a Guinness World Record as the planet's most prolific professional blogger. He's an explorer at heart, having traversed nearly 50 countries and all 50 US states. He's flown over one million miles on Delta alone, and serves as a senior writer at TPG.
Oct. 03, 2018
•
2 min read
Delta-Planes-at-RDU-Airport
Virgin Atlantic Fuel Surcharges on Delta-Operated Flights Are Gone
This post contains references to products from one or more of our advertisers. We may receive compensation when you click on links to those products. Terms apply to the offers listed on this page. For an explanation of our Advertising Policy, visit this page.
Sign up for our daily newsletter

That sound you hear? The collective sigh of relief from points aficionados who appreciate the ability to book (relatively) affordable Delta award tickets via Virgin Atlantic's Flying Club. Earlier this week, several editors at TPG noticed something odd when searching for award tickets via Flying Club. For a couple of days, Delta-operated award tickets were tacking on stratospheric fuel surcharges on routes not involving the United Kingdom.

Flying Club has included lofty surcharges for Delta-operated flights to and from the UK for years now, but flights to other regions have historically not been dinged. When we fired up the Flying Club award search portal this morning, we noticed that the fuel surcharges had once again vanished. Routes like Detroit to Amsterdam and Minneapolis to Tokyo were back to normal, displaying just $5.60 in total taxes and fees for saver-level nonstop award tickets.

Back to normal: Flying Club is showing just $5.60 in taxes for a nonstop Delta One flight between Detroit and Amsterdam

We reached out to Virgin Atlantic to make sense of the switcheroo, and the airline provided us with the following comment: "Virgin Atlantic has not made any changes to pricing. We have replicated the routes and cabins which were included in the article and could not replicate the information."

It seems to boil down to yet another IT glitch, which certainly trumps an unannounced policy change that would completely alter the value of using Flying Club to book Delta award seats going forward. For now, at least, it appears that there's no cause for alarm.

Featured image by Delta aircraft at RDU Terminal 2 (Photo by Darren Murph / The Points Guy)