Good news! According to VA's website, """Under the second stage of the alliance, Virgin Australia is exploring the introduction of new direct services between Australia and China. The alliance partners also plan to continue to expand their codeshare and interline arrangements to provide...

Originally Posted by S : It's such hit and miss. On one arrival into HKG my bag was tagged priority from flying in J, but was the absolute last bag on the carousel! It looks like HKG doesn't have a baggage-processing system that prioritize selected bags. SQ even doesn't bother to give prior...

Originally Posted by Livewireshock : That is great news, I'll check out the Urumqi lounge on Monday morning with this news. It hasn't been formally announced so it doesn't seem to work for now.

HU has its own lounges at Beijing, Urumqi, Xi'an, Haikou and Guangzhou.HX has its only lounge at HKG.

"Velocity Silver, Gold and Platinum members will be able to access priority check-in, priority boarding and additional baggage allowances. Velocity Gold and Platinum members will also be able to access eligible Hong Kong Airlines and Hainan Airlines operated lounges. "An email said, when it came ...

There's no lounge for VA's gold or plat members at Launceston, TAS. No vouchers either. Not sure what for J class pax.

Originally Posted by ChrisCh : VA will 'interline' on routes between HK and China, but not codeshare. This means that provided all of the IT systems are in place and you book your journey on the one ticket, you *should* be able to check-in from your origin through to your final destination with ...

It doesn't need to be codesharing, but do I get two boarding cards or only one when checking-in, and will the luggage be sent directly to the final destination? It can be stressful to pass the immi control twice at HKG for the connected flight.QF and CX have a deal to fly to cities in China throu...

I've just booked a return trip to HKG by using my VA points solidly (nearly). When I chose the seats, I found that more than 70% of the seats were empty (I wasn't allowed to select the seats in the 10-th to 15-th rows, so the 70% is based on the seats I was allowed to select from). The trip is be...

VA sometimes gives pretty higher fare class for the domestic leg in a code sharing journey even the total price is for a lower fare class. For example, the Mel - per leg can be easily upgraded to J class (by using only 9900 ff points) on a flexy-saver Mel - per - sin ticket.  

Not bad, ~$760 for return flights between MEL and HKG, but HKG has to be the final destination. If you want MEL <=> PEK or SHA , then a SIN stopover is inevitable (and the tickets are much more expensive). There are many flights between HKG and PEK, but it will add like $300 to the total pr...

Yes, but with J*. I found my seat was taken, and two genuine boarding passes had exactly the same seat on exactly the same flight. The flight attendant (not the ground staff) was kind enough to gave me another seat so I wasn't kicked off the plane, but it was still curious to me whether I was off...

Your VA Platinum membership downgrades to Gold even if you have earned no credits for a year. This, plus family pooling, makes the cost of maintaining Platinum + Gold the same as Gold + Gold. Also, Platinum has lounge access at LAX, but Gold only has vouchers (but it may be not a bad thing, ...

I'm 100% sure that the MEL <-> HKG VAs were not there until yesterday. Hope they're real...I've updated the title. Thanks.

Yes... VA's website still provides no direct flights to hkg for booking. Hard to tell what's happening since the information is too detailed to be a glitch. Let's guess -- maybe someone in VA is trying to update the flight database at ICAO or somewhere else, which then feeds the information to Go...