Alaska Companion Certificate now works on Virgin America flights

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Virgin Alaska Different Works

One of the best benefits of the Alaska Airlines Visa cards is the annual Companion Certificate, whereby a cardholder can book an itinerary with a companion and pay just $99 + tax for the companion’s ticket. This can be a terrific value when planning complex itineraries and can be a great way to put together a mileage run as both travelers will earn miles and elite credits on the flights. The rules for booking these fares state that travel should be round trip, though in reality the rules have been quite liberal in booking these — with Alaska’s website allowing one-way bookings and multiple stopovers and open-jaws. See this summary from Travel Codex that reviews some of the key rules.

As reported by One Mile at a Time, today brings the good news that in addition to being used for Alaska Airlines flights, the companion certificate can now apply to flights operated by Virgin America. You don’t have to choose one or the other — you can mix and match carriers on a single itinerary:

Virgin and Alaska

This is great news as it opens up a number of new routes and flight times.  One particularly exciting option will be the chance to use the companion fare on Virgin routes to Hawaii. In the past, Virgin has matched the Southwest Companion pass to Virgin Gold status, which opens up Main Cabin Extra seats at no additional charge. I’m not sure whether you’ll be able to use this benefit in conjunction with a companion certificate, but it could work out very well for visiting Hawaii. There are very few lie-flat options to the islands anyway — so if you’re going to fly economy class, you could at least be marginally more comfortable.

Virgin MCE seat
Virgin’s Main Cabin Extra seating gave us a little more space and free food and drinks, ordered from the touch screen monitor and delivered promptly.

If you are an Alaska Airlines cardholder, it is easy to find your discount certificate codes. Simply log into your Alaska Airlines account. On the left side menu under “My Account” you will see “Discount and companion fare codes“.

Alaska Discount Codes Pic

Just click “Valid” and you will see a list of any codes you have available:

Alaska Discount Code Location

To use the discount code, you can start at the Alaska Air home page and click the words “Use discount or companion fare code“:

Alaska home page use companion fare

Then, just select whether you want to search one-way, round-trip, or multi-city. Put in your dates, cities, and code and you can then build your itinerary:

Alaska itinerary code

There are some restrictions on number of segments/stopovers (for example, while the site might show you a flight with a 12-hour layover, it might not allow you to book that flight if you have already maxed out stopovers/segments). A little trial and error will help you surmise what can and can’t be done.

While Alaska Airlines elite members still do not have access to elite benefits like complimentary first-class upgrades on Virgin America, it’s great to see an expansion of this popular benefit to allow bookings on both carriers. Note that your companion certificate is single-use, but if you have the Alaska Airlines Business Visa in addition to the Alaska Airlines Visa Signature card, or some other combination of multiple Alaska Airlines credit cards, you may have multiple discount codes as well. You can find more information about these cards on our Best Offers page.

 

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[…] Airlines companion certificate from co-brand credit cards now works on Virgin America flights […]

[…] Alaska Companion Certificate Now Available for Virgin America Flights:  This is great news!  One of the perks of carrying the Alaska Airlines credit card is the yearly $99+ tax companion certificate.  I’ve taken advantage of this benefit with my Alaska Airlines card and has saved me some money when booking flights for two.  Now that this benefit expands to Virgin America, your opportunities and destinations to use this benefit increase! […]

[…] (hat tip frequentMiler) […]

HokiE36

wonderful news!! still have 7 codes expiring in May/June needs to take care of, unfortunately they cannot be given and used in any other AS accounts but mine…

Grant

I believe you can book travel for other people, but the credit card used has to match the name of the Alaska Airlines account that the companion code came from. So theoretically, you could book tickets for your 2 friends, pay with a credit card in your name (doesn’t even have to be the BofA AS CC) and have your friends pay you back.

PH

Happy to confirm that I’ve done this in the past on pure Alaska itineraries. The rule to use the companion certificate is one of the two following options must be true:

(a) You are traveling on the ticket (so you [Person A] plus Person B)
(b) Your credit card is paying for the ticket (so Person B plus Person C).