A Queenstown travel agent has uncovered major issues with an airline's Covid credits scheme, leaving possibly thousands of Kiwi travellers unable to use them in time.
Victoria Keating of xtravel approached Fair Go after looking inside Virgin Australia's booking system.
She looked at every flight from Queenstown to Australia between mid-August and December 31 when the airline's credits expire, and found that out of a total of 68,712 economy class seats there were only 53 available to be booked with credits and a couple of hundred business class seats available out of 3272 total in that time.
That's 0.07% of seats in economy class, and 8.98% in business class. Keating said that means the chance of using credits before they expire is "pretty much nothing".
Virgin Australia issued Future Flight credits to customers whose flights were cancelled in 2020 due to Covid-19 disruption.
They were made available to those customers whose bookings were made on or before April 20, 2020, when Virgin Australia went into voluntary administration.
Customers who held credits became unsecured creditors. When the airline was purchased by Bain Capital later that year the new owners honoured the credits.
New owners meant different offerings. Virgin Australia, pre-Covid, flew from five New Zealand destinations to Australia — Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin, and Queenstown.
That number is now one — Queenstown.
Customers living in other parts of the country now need to find their way to Queenstown in order to make use of their credits, adding a new cost to the trip.
Even customers that were able to travel to Queenstown faced other barriers in booking travel with Future Flight credits. Unlike other airlines who make every seat on every flight available, Virgin only allows a handful of seats to be purchased with these credits.
"When I went through every single seat on every single plane I was mortified to see how few seats there were," Keating said.
Customers were mortified too, with Fair Go receiving numerous emails from dissatisfied Virgin customers since 2020.
With Virgin Australia doing better financially, Keating said the low capacity of seats available to credit holders is unfair.
"If they are making money and they are looking at giving staff bonuses, why can't they add on extra capacity for seats that can be used for credits?"
In response to Fair Go's questions about its credit scheme, Virgin Australia have made 5000 more seats available to customers using Future Flight credits. However it would not explain why so few seats are allocated for Covid credit use.
"Virgin Australia constantly monitors popular routes, including Queenstown, to make as many seats available as possible. The most recent review has added an additional 5000 seats available to book with Future Flight credits on this route. People interested in this route should try to be flexible with their dates."
When the new seats were added, Keating went back through the system. Her assessment was that there was some more availability to use credits, but that it was only in the short term.
She said that there is "no availability in September", and "not an awful lot" in December either.
"So, it's great they have given us the extra seats but if you can't travel within the next week, it's going to be really hard to be able to use these credits."
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