Virgin Australia Matches Qantas 12 Months Status Extension

I would love to be a fly on the wall of both Virgin Australia and Qantas’s loyalty offices. We can only assume both companies knew about each other’s plans to offer a status extension of sorts but didn’t know the details.

Yesterday, Qantas announced a very generous 12-month extension and late last night Virgin Australia unveiled its plans… which were somewhat disappointing.

Virgin Australia must have realised they have nothing to lose and everything to gain because this morning frequent flyers received the following welcome news from CEO Paul Scurrah:

As we all know, this is a rapidly evolving situation which has developed further in the last 24 hours.
In addition to the Status Credit gift recently announced, we’ll also be extending and preserving the current Status of all Velocity Frequent Flyer Silver, Gold and Platinum members for a further 12 months.
This means that there are no minimum flight sectors required to maintain your current Status, for the next 12 months.
We’ll send you an email in the next two weeks with details on:

  1. Your Status Credit gift
  2. Your 12-month Status extension

In this changing environment, the safety and needs of our members and guests are key and we are really pleased to be able to offer this 12-month Status extension in addition to the Status Credit gift.
Thank you for your continued loyalty and your ongoing support of the Virgin Australia Group.

This is a fantastic turn of events in what is otherwise yet another day of shit news for the travel sector and the word!