Get Virgin Australia status with Delta award ticket

Typically, you can’t get status miles (or any kind of miles!) from an award ticket. However, there seems to be a glitch where you can collect Virgin Australia miles flying on a Delta award ticket.

Last year, I flew LAX-SYD-AKL on VA J, on a DL award ticket (using Skymiles). Before my flight, I setup a Virgin Velocity account. Velocity does not allow non Oceania members, so I put Vanuatu as my country, but put “CANADA” in the line 2 of the address field. Eventually, the Vanuatu postal service forwarded the mail to me.

Call VA before your flight and ask them to put your Velocity number on the PNR. They might say ‘no, no, it’s an award ticket’, but be pushy, eventually they’ll put it in. Worst comes to worst, you can put the Velocity number onto the reservation during check-in.

Surprisingly, I received full J mileage with Velocity:

This was more than enough mileage for me to “pay” for my upcoming hotel in Hong Kong in full (I wouldn’t normally suggest using miles to pay for hotels, but Velocity’s hotel redemption program is pretty good, and when I redeemed these points, I had no idea how Velocity worked). I also got Velocity Silver status. This also worked for my travel partner, who was on a separate PNR, so it wasn’t a one-off.

As a Canadian, it can be difficult to get DL Skymiles. However, Capital One bank has a credit card that makes it possible (this is not a referral link).

TL;DR If you have a VA booking using DL Skymiles, get a VA Velocity number, put it on the reservation, and get full mileage.