How to Book a Reward Flight with Virgin Atlantic
Avios collectors will know that Tesco Clubcard ended its association with the BA scheme in January 2021. If Tesco is where you do your weekly shop this frustrating news may be prompting you to take a closer look at Virgin Atlantic reward flights, as the airline is now Clubcard’s exclusive reward flight partner.
The good news is that Virgin’s loyalty scheme has been recently revamped, making it a much more worthwhile option. There are many more ways to earn points across the Virgin group and your Virgin reward flights can now even help advance your Virgin Atlantic Flying Club tier status, bringing treats like lounge access within easier reach.
Here’s the latest on how you can rack up the new style points and turn them into Virgin reward flights.
What’s in a name?
For years, if you were a Virgin Atlantic Flying Club member you collected Virgin Atlantic Flying Club Miles. This five-word name was hardly catchy, so many people simply referred to the points as ‘Virgin air miles’.
This year Virgin finally addressed the tongue twister and renamed its miles as Virgin Points.
What else is new?
You can now earn Virgin Points without even setting foot on a plane. The Virgin Atlantic Flying Club loyalty scheme has been brought into the new Virgin Red loyalty programme, which works across multiple Virgin brands.
UK based Virgin Atlantic Flying Club members can now activate a Virgin Red account and the Virgin Points they rack up can be spent across either linked programme. And, unlike the old ‘Virgin air miles’, they never expire.
As we explained in a previous post, this is great news because you’re now not mainly earning from travelling with Virgin and its partner airlines and hotels. The points you collect doing anything from scrolling on your Virgin mobile to working out at a Virgin gym can now be put towards Virgin reward flights. That’s along with points earned shopping online with partners like Apple, ASOS, Argos, eBay and John Lewis. Even turning on your heating this winter could be a cheery prospect if you’re earning Virgin Points towards your next flight through Octopus Energy.
With Tesco meanwhile, you continue to earn 2.5 Virgin Points for each £1 you spend on shopping or fuel but now Virgin is the supermarket’s exclusive airline partner we’re likely to see more special offers, like a recent promotion that gave customers a whopping extra 2,000 Virgin Points for signing up to auto-convert their Clubcard rewards.
How do I book reward flights on Virgin?
You can book a reward seat across all Virgin Atlantic classes — Economy Classic, Premium or Upper Class.
The time of year you intend to travel makes things slightly more tricky as the minimum number of points you’ll need varies. Off peak (what Virgin calls ‘standard season’), you need from 18,000 points for an Economy Classic return flight but in peak season you’ll need at least 22,000.
The dates which Virgin Atlantic defines as “Peak Season’’, depend in part on the weather patterns for where you’re headed. To simplify things Virgin breaks this down into Caribbean and non-Caribbean.
You can use a reward flight website or Virgin Atlantic’s own interactive reward flight tool to calculate if you have enough points for your intended journey. If you haven’t already got a dream destination in mind, or are planning to fly at short notice, Virgin Atlantic also has a Reward Flight deals page, showing where your points could take you within the next few weeks. For instance, we found for late September/early October 2021 you could take an economy return flight to Barbados for 20,000 Virgin Points plus £305 in taxes.
When you’re ready to book, you can search for your destination and dates in the usual way at Virginatlantic.com but for a reward flight you set the search tool to ‘show price in points’. If your dates are flexible select the ‘within five weeks’ option to show you more reward seat availability around your preferred time. You can also call Virgin Atlantic Flying Club to book and they can hold reward seats for you for 48 hours.
There’s also a ‘points plus money’ search option (available online only) which will offer you more availability but will not give you as good value per point as a pure reward flight.
The first batch of Virgin’s reward seats are released 330 days before departure so the earlier you book the more chance you have of bagging one.
Once you’ve booked, remember, since a generous move last September, Virgin Atlantic reward flights can now count towards your tier status in the Virgin Atlantic Flying Club.
So long as your reward flights are made with Virgin itself, rather than its partner airlines like Air France and KLM, you’ll earn 25 tier points on each leg of an economy flight, 50 for premium economy and 100 in Upper Class.
To put that in context, you need 400 tier points over a rolling 12 month period to make the Silver tier and 1,000 tier points to hit the heady heights of gold. Silver gets you perks like premium check-in and bonus points on the flights you pay for in cash, while gold gets you coveted Clubhouse access.
If you have a Virgin credit card it’s also worth knowing that the 2–4–1 vouchers you earn can now be redeemed across Economy, Premium or Upper Class no matter what your tier status, though if you are in the Red tier your Upper Class discount is capped at 50%.
Where can I fly?
Virgin is the second-largest UK-based long-haul airline and it serves the Caribbean and US particularly well. Tel Aviv is the closest spot for year-round sun and there are routes to three cities in Africa, two each in India and Pakistan, plus Shanghai and Hong Kong in China. Virgin has departures from Heathrow, Manchester, Edinburgh and (seasonally) Belfast.
How do Virgin Points compare to Avios?
Of course, the Virgin Atlantic route network is a fraction of BA’s so you don’t have access to that same global reach, though booking Virgin’s partners, such as Delta and Air New Zealand, certainly increases your options. However, for UK departures, British Airways and the Oneworld alliance offer a far wider choice of reward flight destinations.
There are however many more ways to earn those Virgin Points, on simple everyday transactions on the high street. You can use both the Virgin Red and Tesco Clubcard programmes to boost your balance. Virgin Atlantic also makes it easy for you to gift your Virgin Points by transferring them to another Flying Club member. This can be useful if you aren’t planning a trip but friends or family members are.
Unlike BA, Virgin doesn’t guarantee a set number of reward seats per flight. However, the rewards available for redemption are backed by very flexible booking policies and can represent excellent value, particularly when you exchange your points for Upper Class tickets. Using your Virgin Points to upgrade an existing booking is straightforward too and arguably it’s easier to use points for upgrades on Virgin Atlantic than BA.
With Avios, you can’t earn Tier Points on a reward flight booking. However, With Virgin Atlantic, your reward flights now count towards your tier status. This new move is a generous one we hope other airlines will follow.
