Virgin Blue Airlines is celebrating turning nine years old with $9 seats on sale across a range of routes in the first of what the airline says will be regular Twitter sales.

The $9 ‘Tweet seats’, which the company indicated are priced deliberately at less than a bottle of birthday champagne, will only be available through the Virgin Twitter site.

From 9pm until sold out, the airline will offer 1,000 $9 one-way fares for Virgin Blue Twitter fans to destinations including Canberra-Sydney, Port Macquarie-Sydney, Brisbane-Newcastle and Rockhampton-Brisbane.

The airline Group will also add Pacific Blue flights to its future tweet seats sale fares, offering deals from Australia to destinations such as New Zealand, Fiji, Vanuatu and Samoa.

Virgin Blue Group chief executive officer, Brett Godfrey, said, “This is a bit of fun and also a bit of an experiment trialling distribution through one of the latest forms of social media. Our marketing team has been closely watching worldwide consumer trends in markets where travellers are already social media savvy and we see Australians fast developing a following for Twitter as a source of the latest information regarding a wide range of products and services including airline news.”