Home » News » Agents call for Virgin to scrap COVID credit expiry date, offer refunds

14 December, 2023

Agents call for Virgin to scrap COVID credit expiry date, offer refunds

In September, Virgin Australia announced that it was extending the expiry date on COVID credits from the end of this year to mid-2025.

The change was welcomed by many in the industry, particularly at a time when Qantas received widespread criticism for its credits system. However, many agents still believe that the expiry date should be axed altogether.

Holly Velardo, the director of her own business Hollyday Travel said that Virgin should axe its expiry date, especially considering Qantas did.

“I think if Qantas is being forced to do that, then I think Virgin absolutely should follow,” Velardo told Travel Weekly.

“This was clients’ money and a lot of clients had business-class flights.”

Velardo commended Virgin for providing informative documentation for agents and allowing clients to transfer points into a travel bank so that they could book flights when they wanted.

Diane Yates, a TravelManagers agent with mainly corporate clients, expressed a similar sentiment to Velardo, but outlined a problem she had faced when booking via the global distribution system (GDS) Amadeus.

Yates said that many of her corporate clients had a private fair arrangement with Virgin and she could use credits for clients whose name the ticket was not in and not incur a fee. However, this only applied when making a booking up until the end of this year.

This issue was exacerbated by the automatic purging which happens to tickets in a GDS after 12 months. Meaning Yates had to contact Virgin every time she wanted to use one of these purged credits and said that she had “about 24 hours to reissue the ticket”. She isn’t able to reinstate a batch of them, meaning she has to do it one at a time.

“I’ve had to have a big record of everything and take notice of everything in the bookings. Then I have to call Virgin every time I want to check a credit to see if it’s still valid or not. And that can be a bit of a nuisance because I’ve got a big list,” she said.

Yates continued: “To have these credits expire at the end of December is really quite painful, because I’ve got quite a few there that will lose a lot of money if they’re not re-issued before then.”

In a statement, Virgin told Travel Weekly: “The Virgin Australia assists agents to use the value of the tickets, which may be by reactivating valid tickets that are on file in our system (including COVID credits, which are Standard Credits issued between 21 April 2020 and 31 July 2022) or by other methods, depending on the age of the ticket.”

Neither Yates nor Velardo said they had received direct reminders for these COVID credits, but Yates mentioned that she had some forwarded to her by clients.

“It would be lovely if they would refund these credits,” Yates said. “I understand Qantas was under pressure to do that and that’s made life a lot easier.”

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Email the Travel Weekly team at traveldesk@travelweekly.com.au

Diane Yates Holly Velardo Hollyday Travel travelmanagers virgin australia