A Gold Star for Virgin Australia's Frequent Flyer Status Match

October 18, 2011 at 4:13 PM | by jetflyboy | Comments (0)

One of the old Virgin Blue Velocity Gold cards

Virgin Australia, the airline formerly known as Virgin Blue, not only changed their name back in May, but flipped the flying game in Australia.

More recently, the Aussie airline upped the ante competing with Qantas by offering a Velocity Frequent Flyer status match for other airline's frequent flyer programs. With a simple email and proof of your current status with a competing program, Virgin bellied up to the bar and automatically (not to mention quickly) upgraded any member to the corresponding status in Velocity.

We received our Gold Welcome pack within four weeks, including well-designed luggage tags and, naturally, a shiny new card. Now, Virgin doesn't have the cool Q-tags for bags that Qantas has, but the less-than-techie Velocity tags do garner a little recognition when traveling through Australian airports.

The fun isn't limited to airports down under, but with a higher Virgin Australia status, members do get some more partner perks on Etihad, Singapore Airlines and Delta. Not bad at all. Additional fun in higher Velocity tiers includes Hilton HHonors elite status and Hertz #1 Gold level.

We're excited to see how this plays out in the Australian aviation world; perhaps even better benefits for Aussie jet setters!? Finally, the game just got interesting.

[Photo: Virgin]

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