What Does The Free Virgin Atlantic Covid-19 Insurance Cover?

a white airplane with a black text on it

Some links to products and travel providers on this website will earn Traveling For Miles a commission that helps contribute to the running of the site. Traveling For Miles has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Traveling For Miles and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone and have not been reviewed, endorsed, or approved by any of these entities. Terms apply to all credit card welcome offers, earning rates and benefits and some credit card benefits will require enrollment. For more details please see the disclosures found at the bottom of every page. Advertizer Disclosure: TravelingForMiles.com may receive commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on TravelingForMiles.com are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. TravelingForMiles.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers.

Some links to products and travel providers on this website will earn Traveling For Miles a commission that helps contribute to the running of the site. Traveling For Miles has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Traveling For Miles and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone and have not been reviewed, endorsed, or approved by any of these entities. For more details please see the disclosures found at the bottom of every page.


Virgin Atlantic has been on a roll with announcements of late and, once again, the latest announcement (published yesterday) caught most people unawares. For flight bookings for travel through the end of March 2021, the airline will offer all passengers free Covid-19 insurance with no restrictions on age, travel class, or length of journey. But what exactly does this insurance cover?

Virgin Atlantic Covid-19 Insurance – Summary

Key Facts:

  • The insurance is valid for any flight or holiday booked using a Virgin Atlantic ticket, for travel between 24 August 2020 and 31 March 2021.
  • Award bookings are covered
  • Cover ends on 31 March 2021 irrespective of when travel ends.
  • There is no excess/copay payable with this policy

The Insurance Covers The Following:

  • Cover for the whole trip, with no upper limit on the length of your trip other than the fact that cover will cease on 31 March 2021.
  • Cover for all passengers on a Virgin Atlantic booking with no restrictions on age, travel class, or length of journey.
  • Up to £500,000 necessary and emergency medical expenses incurred due to Coronavirus affecting you or your travel companions.
  • Repatriation due to Coronavirus, should it be medically necessary.
  • Necessary additional costs in the event that you or your traveling companion be denied boarding or individually requested to quarantine in your destination due to Coronavirus.

an airplane parked at an airport

The Cover In More Detail

  • To be covered by Virgin Atlantic’s Covid-19 insurance passengers must have booked through Virgin Atlantic (i.e their ticket numbers must start with 932). Bookings through partner airlines that happen to involve travel on Virgin Atlantic are not covered.
  • The £500,000 of cover is for costs outside of your home country and include the following (per person):
    • Treatment: medical, surgical, medication costs, hospital, nursing home or nursing services.
    • Repatriation: your repatriation to your home country if medically necessary.
    • Transport and accommodation: reasonable extra transport and accommodation costs for you and any one other person who stays or travels with you or to you from your home country on medical advice.
    • Funeral expenses: the reasonable cost of transporting your body or ashes to your home or up to £5,000 for your funeral expenses, in the place where you die outside your home country.
  • The quarantine and denied boarding cover is valid for personal accommodation, transport costs, refreshments, booking change fees, and other travel expenses incurred. There’s a £1,000 limit for refreshments and a £3,000 limit for all other costs.
  • Within a traveler’s home country the insurance covers up to £1,500 for reasonable extra transport and accommodation costs for you and any one other person who stays or travels with you or to you from within your home country on medical advice; and the reasonable cost of transporting you, your ashes or body home.

Full details of cover can be found in this document (.pdf)

Important To Know

The Virgin Atlantic Covid-19 insurance isn’t a replacement for travel or medical insurance – it only covers instances of Covid-19 – and that should be a very important consideration for anyone considering traveling right now.

There are a substantial number of insurance companies whose regular travel insurance is invalid in countries that have been deemed unsafe for travel by a person’s home government – traveling to those countries without specialist cover is inadvisable.

For example, if someone with UK travel insurance was to travel to a country for which the UK government’s advice warns against “all but essential travel” (i.e most of the world including the USA), their travel insurance would almost certainly not be valid and would not cover them in the event of a non-Covid issue. Virgin Atlantic’s Covid-19 policy would cover them if the issue was Covid-19 related but they would be without cover for everything else.

It is very important that you understand under what circumstances your own travel/medical insurance will cover you when you’re away from home as the Virgin Atlantic Covid-19 insurance will not be of any use if/when a non-Covid issue arises. 

a row of seats in an airplane
Virgin Atlantic A330-300 Upper Class Cabin

Bottom Line

I’m a big fan of Virgin Atlantic, I think the recent changes to some of the Flying Club benefits are great, and I’m delighted to read that the airline appears to have secured the necessary funding to keep flying but, while it remains inadvisable for people to travel to the destinations Virgin Atlantic serves, this insurance is not much more than a gimmick.

Yes, once travelers don’t need specialist (additional) insurance to travel across the Atlantic this Covid-19 insurance will be very useful and will put a lot of people’s minds at ease. Up until then, however, there’s nothing much to see here.

1 COMMENT

  1. Exclusion 3 is

    “You not following any advice or recommendations made by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, World Health Organization or any government or other official authority.”

    At the moment this excludes every country Virgin flies to.

Comments are closed.