Virgin Atlantic Flying Club temporarily loses access to Air France and KLM award seats

In what is hoped to be a brief issue, Virgin Atlantic's Flying Club program is currently unable to access award seats on flights operated by Air France or KLM in any class.

In the past, using points for flights on these two SkyTeam partner airlines was highly advantageous, with business-class tickets across the Atlantic available for as low as 47,500 miles, free from the hefty carrier-imposed fees that the Flying Club charges on flights with Virgin Atlantic and now Delta Air Lines.

When checking the Air France or KLM page on the Flying Club website, users see a warning banner indicating that seats are not available for booking online or through the Flying Club call center.

Attempting to search for cash flights operated by Air France or KLM on Virgin's website leads to an error, although codeshare flights with "VS" flight numbers from these airlines can still be booked.

TPG reached out to Flying Club in hopes of gathering more details about the outage and a potential timeline for when the seats might be available again.

Virgin Atlantic could only share the same information found in the website's disclaimer:

Due to a system glitch, customers are currently unable to redeem Virgin Points for Air France/KLM seats. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused, and our teams are diligently working to resolve this. We anticipate that bookings will reopen at the start of August.

We remain hopeful that this limitation is only temporary and that the award seats will be restored soon, as promised by the Flying Club program. We'll keep you informed as the situation evolves.

Fortunately, if you're looking to book Air France-KLM flights, Flying Blue partners with all major credit card rewards programs, including American Express Membership Rewards, Bilt Rewards, Capital One, Chase Ultimate Rewards, Citi ThankYou Rewards, and Wells Fargo Rewards. Additionally, with Flying Blue's monthly Promo Rewards, you can find economy flights from major U.S. cities to Europe for as low as 15,000 miles.