Hawaiian Airlines’ program is unique in that they partner with Virgin Atlantic yet don’t impose fuel surcharges on those redemptions, which is the only airline where that’s the case. Every other one of Virgin Atlantic’s partners imposes massive fuel surcharges on their redemptions, greatly taking away from the value of such redemptions.

They also used to have very reasonable redemption rates. Upper Class from the US to London cost 100,000 miles roundtrip, and Upper Class from the US to anywhere else in the world cost 140,000 miles roundtrip. That was an amazing value, given that you could fly from Los Angeles to London to Hong Kong to Sydney roundtrip for that amount, for example.

Now, without any notice, they’ve totally devalued their redemptions for travel on Virgin Atlantic, as follows:

Now the pricing isn’t actually clear. I’m not sure what they consider to be “North America East” and “North America West,” but for travel between North America and London in Upper Class we’re looking at a 25-60% devaluation.

I don’t get the other pricing, however. Is the pricing to the Caribbean, Africa, and Middle East from the US or London? If the former, that doesn’t make any sense, since does that mean one can fly from the US to London to the Caribbean on a single ticket? And if the latter, well, that’s really expensive.

Either way, it sucks that they made the change without notice, and a bit of clarification would certainly be nice.

(Tip of the hat to Gary)