A review of the Virgin Atlantic Reward credit card, UK version.
Airline rewards credit cards can bring flights to your dream holiday destinations into your reach for a much lower overall cost than you might have imagined. Play the points game correctly and you could be jetting off to your dream destination with significant savings.
The Virgin Atlantic Reward card awards 0.75 Virgin points per £1 spent on the card, and has a sign up bonus of 3,000 Virgin Points for new card holders. It also promises a Flying Club reward voucher if you hit a certain spend threshold (£20,000) within a twelve month period.
I currently hold this card, and at the moment I use it mainly as a fall back to mop up airline points when my British Airways AmEx card is not accepted.
Below we will look at the free Virgin card, and compare it to the paid Reward+ card too.
N.B. The article that follows constitutes my own opinions and thoughts, and should not be taken as financial advice. Make sure to do your own due diligence!
About the card
The card is a free Mastercard issued by Virgin Money. There is also a paid Rewards+ card with a £160 annual fee. Further below we will explore the key differences between the free and paid cards, but first let’s take a look at the free card…
The points earned on your card are transferred out on your statement date each month straight into your Virgin Flying Club account. They will not show up in your Virgin apps at all until the designated transfer date! This can make it a bit of a challenge to keep track of your points accumulation on a day to day basis.
You will need to register for a Virgin Atlantic Flying Club account if you do not already have one. Virgin also has a separate rewards/points scheme called Virgin Red. Both have their own separate apps, and there is also the Virgin Money app, in which you manage your credit card.
Your points will show in your Red or Flying Club accounts and can be spent in either. In Virgin Red there are various things to spend points on, including wine, experience days, even Greggs bakery products! In the Flying Club app or website, you redeem points on flights.
As with British Airways Avios, a non-flight redemption will usually work out at 0.5p value per point, which is pretty poor value. There can be honourable exceptions to this rule which we will touch on later, but as our focus is travel, we’ll concentrate mainly on the potential to use the points toward flights.
The Reward card comes with no annual fee.
Representative APR is 26.9% APR variable, including purchases.
Virgin points are earned at 0.75 points per £1 spent, or 1.5 points for every £1 spent with Virgin Atlantic or Virgin Holidays.
There are no foreign exchange fees if spending in Euros, Swedish Krona, or Romanian Lei. This actually makes it quite a handy card to use for your European breaks.
What is the sign-up bonus and how is it earned?
Currently, the standard sign up bonus on the free card is 3,000 Virgin Points. There is no spending target, you will earn the points after your have used the card your first time. The points are credited on or shortly after your first statement.
The Flying Club Reward Voucher
The card has the potential to trigger the Flying Club reward voucher if you spend £20,000 in a card membership year. A pretty steep spending requirement!
You can only earn one reward voucher every twelve months.
Virgin has recently announced that all available seats on its flights can be booked with points (plus payment of some taxes and fees in cash). Unlike with Avios, you can use your companion ticket against a cash booking if you wish.
Reward flight prices on Virgin Atlantic are not at fixed rates, and quotes in points for the same routes can vary wildly! Virgin has a lot of attractive Caribbean and US routes, and a few African and Asian destinations too.
Red (no status) Flying Club members can only redeem the voucher for an upgrade or companion seat up to the value of 75,000 Virgin Points. A silver or gold member can redeem up to the value of 150,000 Virgin Points.
The Virgin Atlantic website will let you search for available reward flights, with the cost being a mix of cash and points. The Flying Club reward voucher would usually halve the number of points needed to pay for a trip for two (but see below for exceptions!), however you would still pay the taxes and charges for two people.
The companion voucher will halve the price in Virgin Points for seats in economy or premium economy cabins, making it a true 2 for 1. You would still pay taxes and charges for two, however.
However, for redemption in Upper Class (what most other airlines would call business) it only works as a 2 for 1.5 voucher, unless you hold silver or gold status with Virgin Flying Club, in which case you will then be quoted true 2 for 1 figures. That’s a bit confusing, so here’s an example.
Let’s take the simple example of a theoretical 100,000 Virgin Point flight redemption for two people in Upper Class:
- A silver or gold status Flying Club member will get this at half the points price, i.e., they will pay 50,000 points (but will still pay taxes and charges for two passengers).
- A no status (red) member would pay 75,000 points for the same redemption (again, they will also pay taxes and charges for two people).
Alternatively you can use your voucher to upgrade to the next cabin up – either one leg of a return flight for two passengers, or both legs of a return flight for one person. However, you cannot upgrade an Economy Light (bare bones economy) booking with a voucher.
More about Virgin Points… and how much are they worth?
Just like Avios, the widely held consensus is that a Virgin Point should be valued at one British penny. For example, if my balance were 20,000 Virgin Points, I would convert to £ by removing the last two zeroes (or divide by 100), and consider that I have a balance with the potential for at least £200 saving on the cash price of a flight.
By doing the above I can usually see quite easily that redemptions on Virgin Red are worth less than they might be if redeemed on flights. For example, currently Virgin Red is offering me a £50 Virgin Wines voucher for 10,000 points, which is poor value at 0.5p per point compared to the £100+ value that I might get by booking a flight.
With Virgin Red you can spend points on hotels, concert tickets, experience days, wine, cruises, and some other things like Greggs cakes. When doing so you will typically get much worse value than if you spend them wisely on flights, but this is perhaps not quite as clear cut as it is with Avios. There can be concert tickets or cruise redemptions which are good value compared to the cash cost, for example.
Also, not every Virgin flight redemption will necessarily provide better value than the outright cash price, so proceed with caution, and be sure to compare to the standard cash price. We will cover how to work out how to calculate the value you’re getting for your points in more depth in a future article.
Let’s take a look at two different London to USA points redemption quotes in the Virgin Atlantic app, one way for one passenger…
Comparing the one way Upper Class quotes in the snapshots above and below of London to USA points redemption, we can see how there can be a huge variance in points cost. Admittedly MCO (Orlando) is a slightly longer flight from London than BOS (Boston), but even so the difference in the points required is huge!
You can see in the examples above what a difference in points cost there can be. The points cost for one person one-way in Upper Class to Orlando at 205,000 points + £670 does not look good value compared to 35,000 + £495 London-Boston in Upper Class.
The cash price for the Orlando one-way flight in Upper Class is £7416, the Boston flight is more expensive at £7764. So we can see that the Boston flight in points is actually a mega value redemption!
In both examples, the saving over the quoted cash price is considerable.
–
You can also spend Virgin points on flights with the following airlines (among others) :
Air France
KLM
Delta
ANA (All Nippon Airways)
Virgin is in a group of airlines (or alliance) known as Skyteam, which includes the airlines above, and several others. There are a number of other airlines in the alliance, and you can see a full list here. We’re reviewing the credit card here rather than doing a deep dive into Virgin’s partner airlines, so I have abridged the list to save space.
Benefits
The Flying Club reward voucher – this is an attractive benefit of the card, but on the free card needs a massive £20,000 annual spend to trigger. It also does not provide true 2 for 1 value in upper class unless you hold higher than red status with Virgin Atlantic.
Points earning – 0.75 points per £1 is pretty generous for a free card. You’re going to spend the money anyway, so why not earn some points? DO NOT use points earning or voucher targets as a reason to overspend! ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS pay your statements on time and in full, otherwise the value of any points earned will be obliterated by the interest charges you accrue.
Regular offers – check the Virgin app regularly for various cashback offers intended to seduce you into spending at certain retailers. There are some pretty well known retailers, and it’s not so London-centric or high end as the typical AmEx offers. There’s a good chance of getting some bonus cash back here and there, even if you never check the offers, as you do not need to click “load to card” as you do with some rivals.
Lack of foreign exchange fees for Euro, Swedish Krona, and Romanian Lei. This can make your Virgin card a very handy travel companion in Europe. We recently went to Spain, and I parked up my British Airways AmEx with it’s 2.99% foreign exchange fees in favour of using my Virgin card for all our Euro spending, earning points and saving on foreign exchange fees.
Widespread acceptance – Mastercard is universally accepted, hence you’ll never miss out on points because your card was not welcome.
Drawbacks
The £20,000 spend threshold for the voucher is high. It’s a pretty hefty amount by anyone’s standards.
Virgin’s taxes and charges can be high. Compared to British Airways, Virgin’s cash taxes and charges portion of a redemption is often higher. Potentially it could be challenging to get good value for your points in economy or premium compared to the cash equivalent price.
Income requirements and eligibility
You need to have a minimum annual income of £7,000 to be eligible.
Income is not the whole story however. Your credit history and score will need to be decent. I highly recommend finding a good eligibility checker first. Ideally one that only does a soft search on your credit file. Check your eligibility for airline rewards credit cards with Money Saving Expert A failed application with a hard search on your record could hurt your credit score.
Welcome bonus eligibility criteria is quite hard to find, even on Virgin’s own site! I believe that you need to have not applied for any Virgin Money credit card in the preceding three months.
App experience
The Virgin Money app for the credit card itself is a fairly decent user experience. However, on android I’ve had some occasional issues with it infinitely hanging on the loading screen and needing to be process-killed and restarted. If this happens, it usually loads up fine on the second or third attempt.
Your progress toward the annual spend target for the companion voucher is easy to see in-app. Your tally of Virgin points earned from credit card spend only updates on the statement date however, and you cannot see how many points are attributed to each individual purchase as you can with the American Express app. It’s a B-minus for the app from me!
Points can also be checked in the Virgin Atlantic app or Virgin Red app (see below). Both are quite attractive apps with nice graphics in Virgin’s red-themed scheme, and they are both reliable, with solid user interfaces.
Reward+ vs. the free Reward card
There are some key differences between the free card and the paid Reward+ card. Let’s start with the free card.
The Reward (free) credit card.
- Welcome bonus of 3,000 Virgin Points as soon as you’ve made your first purchase.
- No annual card fee.
- Flying Club reward voucher triggered at £20,000 annual spend.
- 0.75 points per £1 spent.
- Representative APR 26.9% p.a.
And now the Reward+ card.
The Reward+ credit card.
- Welcome bonus 18,000 Virgin Points as soon as you’ve made your first purchase.
- Annual card fee £160.
- Reward voucher triggered at £10,000 annual spend.
- 1.5 points per £1 spent.
- Representative APR 69.7% (including the annual card fee).
Conclusion
Is Virgin’s free Reward credit card offering worth a space in your wallet? Well, the Flying Club Reward Voucher is certainly an attractive perk, but I do have some reservations.
Consider whether you’re realistically going to spend £20,000 in a card year in order to trigger the voucher. If you’re someone who spends that kind of money in a year, surely the £160 annual fee for the Reward+ card is well within your reach. Not only does the paid card have far more powerful points earning potential, but it also has a much lower spend of £10,000 to trigger the reward voucher.
In fact, the only scenario in which I see the free Reward card as being worth getting is if you spend less than £10,000 in a typical card year and have no hope of triggering the reward voucher with either card. In this scenario it does not seem worth paying the £160 annual card fee for the Reward+ card.
If you do spend more than £10,000 in a year though, you might as well spend the £160 annual fee on the Reward+ card. You’ll earn at least 15,000 points, which almost cancels out the fee (if you value at 1p per point). In year one the 18,000 point bonus does effectively cancel out the fee anyway. Then consider the potential value of the reward voucher on top of this, and the card is definitely worth the annual fee…
Personally, I fit into the first scenario. I’m focusing mainly on Avios and AmEx at the moment, but I’m not currently eligible for a Barclaycard Avios Mastercard to use as fallback when AmEx is not accepted. Hence, I got myself the free Virgin Reward card to mop up some points in Mastercard only situations, but there’s no way I’m currently going to put £10,000 or £20,000 through it.
I intend to take up the Reward+ card at some point in the future and earn the voucher, and it’s nice to pre-empt this and bank some occasional Virgin points now and again.
In addition, I’ve found the Virgin card very useful on overseas trips within Europe. Where my AmEx card would have incurred 2.99% foreign transaction fees, I’ve pulled out the Virgin Reward card and been able to spend fee free in Europe and still earn a few airline miles.
In conclusion then, this card definitely has a use case and value, albeit a slightly limited one. If you’re a loyal Virgin Atlantic flyer who is likely to exceed £10,000 per year in general spending, then you should seriously consider the Reward+ card instead, despite its £160 annual fee.
–
Booked your flights already? Use trip.com’s hotel finder tool to look for your accommodation
Disclosure : the article above contains affiliate links, which may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps us to keep our site running and growing.
Read our other points and loyalty articles here
See our destination reports and guides here
Read our UK articles about travel and days out here
