Hot town, summer in the city!
I was recently lucky enough to be selected to talk at an event in NYC. Now for someone who loves New York that's like a dream come true - however...I had to pay for the trip. I love to travel with Virgin Atlantic because of how well they look after you on the flight.
I took my time searching all flight providers to get the best value flight (not easy in August!). In doing so, I learned:
You can often get a Premium seat for less than a standard seat
A little flexibility in travel dates can go a long way with regards to saving you £££.
(I also signed up to Virgin Atlantic's Flying Club because..it's free and I hope to book more flights with them in the next year or so).
Make sure you select Flexible Dates!
When you go to Virgin Atlantic's site, enter where you want to fly from and to, put in the dates you ideally want to be there, and then be sure to tick the box for flexible travel dates! Shown in the image below.
There are only a few places this is easy to find on the site. You can do this from the home screen, or once you have carried out a search, you can see this at the top and you can search for the cheapest flights in a 5-week window at a glance!
When I know I've a trip coming up I start looking a couple of weeks before I'm going to book, you will find that the prices go both up and down for certain dates. Earmark how much realistically you're willing to spend and find something that fits within that. You will always be offered to upgrade from economy to classic and premium which is only worth it if you want to take checked baggage and if you can afford it. I found the food really nice and the seats catered for all heights (I'm 5ft and the guy next to me was about 6'4" and he found it comfortable too!)
In reality checked baggage is going to cost around £30 anyway and although I can happily do a week in Europe with 10kgs of luggage, it's hard to go stateside with only cabin baggage. So given that, you might find the upgrade doesn't seem that much than about £70 more to Economy Classic instead of Economy Light. Premium is normally more expensive, but as my booking happened, I logged in after a few goes of checking different dates, and one-day Premium was cheaper than Economy, so I snapped it up!
Being a Millennial (Just) I had to take pictures of my meals of course. It's fair to say, this is some of the best airplane food I've had!
I would love to show you all the meals and snacks on the return flight...however, having booked the overnight flight to give me the maximum time in New York! I literally started watching a film, and nodded off for the whole flight!
In summary, I can definitely recommend upgrading to Premium for a flight that is over 4 hours. I don't normally travel that well so for me it was really worth having a comfortable journey especially as I was straight back to work the next day!
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