Virgin Atlantic Promo: 50% More Virgin Points & Tier Points For Travel In 2021

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Update: Virgin Atlantic has confirmed that a booking made with a travel voucher will qualify for this promotion as long as the booking complies with all the other rules.

Virgin Atlantic has been doing a serious amount of tinkering with its Flying Club loyalty program in the past few months (there’s been good news and bad news) and today sees the airline launching a bonus Virgin Points & Tier Points promotion that’s designed to tempt the Flying Club membership back into the skies and to get people buying tickets for travel in 2021.

Virgin’s 50% More Virgin Points & Tier Points Promotion

For a limited time only, Flying Club members making new bookings will earn 50% more Virgin Points (formerly Flying Club Miles) and 50% more Tier Points for flights booked across the Virgin Atlantic network.

Here are the key terms and conditions of the promotion:

• The bonus Tier Points offer is only applicable for new revenue bookings and new Reward Flights bookings made directly with Virgin Atlantic.
• The bonus Virgin Points offer is only applicable for new revenue bookings made directly with Virgin Atlantic.
• The promotion is valid for bookings made between 8 January and 2 February 2021.
• Bonus Virgin Points & bonus Tier Points will be awarded on all Virgin Atlantic operated flights departing between 8 January and 31 December 2021.

This is what the new Tier Point earnings will look like for bookings made during the promotion period:

As a reminder, Virgin Flying Club Silver Status requires 400 Tier Points & Gold Status requires 1,000 Tier Points.

Note: Virgin Atlantic awards Virgin Points based on the fare booked and the distance traveled so the number of bonus points on offer will vary from route to route.

Quick Thoughts

Virgin Atlantic just made it a lot easier to earn Flying Club status for anyone prepared to make some bookings between now and 2 February.

While the negative aspects of this promotion are that existing bookings will not qualify and that there’s a limited booking window, it’s also important to note that the promotion covers the whole of the current booking period so, in that sense, it’s pretty generous.

Also, I can’t really fault Virgin Atlantic for limiting this to new bookings as, clearly, this is a promotion that’s designed to get new cash flowing into the airline and if you already have a booking with Virgin Atlantic you don’t need to be incentivized any more 😁

One question that I suspect a few people will be asking is whether or not bookings made with existing travel vouchers will qualify for this promotion? Well, I’ve now had a chance to check this with Virgin Atlantic and the airline has confirmed that a booking made with a travel voucher will definitely qualify for this promotion as long as the booking complies with all the other promotion rules. That’s very good news.

Overall, it’s good to see Virgin coming out with a promotion like this and, to be frank, it is a promotion that the airline probably had to come up with considering the current state of the travel world. A significant number of people thought that we’d be a lot further down the road to normality by now, but you just have to take a look at the strict lockdown in the UK, the continuing stay-at-home orders in various parts of the United States, and the new lockdown measures appearing in various other parts of the world to realize that we’re not even close to seeing the end of the current crisis.

2021 may end up not being quite as bad for travel as 2020, but it’s almost certainly still going to be a pretty terrible year so this is unlikely to be the only good airline promotion we see in the coming weeks and months – standby for more promotions as it becomes increasingly obvious that people will continue to find it difficult to travel in 2021.

Bottom Line

Virgin Atlantic has just launched a new promotion in which it’s offering 50% more redeemable points (Virgin Points) and 50% more Tier Points on all new bookings made by 2 February for travel through the end of December 2021.

What do you think of the latest Virgin Atlantic promotion? Will it tempt you into a booking?