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How to redeem your Virgin Atlantic Credit Card Upgrade voucher
Virgin Atlantic Reward+ Credit Card is probably the best non-Amex traveller card in the UK, and the Tier Reward after hitting £10,000 annual spend is quite attractive. One of the rewards to choose from is an upgrade voucher, and I’ll talk about how to use it today.
[Receiving the Voucher]
First of all, you should receive the voucher within 30 days of spending the qualifying amount. You won’t receive an email or see it in your Virgin Atlantic account, but you’ll see the following row in the activity statement:
You don’t need to specifically choose from the three Tier Rewards, instead whenever you are ready you can just redeem straightaway.
[Facts]
The voucher can be used on both revenue and reward tickets. This is a big advantage over the BA upgrade voucher issued by Barclaycard.
Only Virgin Atlantic operated flights are upgradable. Economy Light tickets are non-upgradable.
The voucher can be used to upgrade a return flight or two one-way flights. You can use half of the voucher on a one-way flight and save the other half for the future.
You can upgrade one-cabin, i.e. Economy to Premium or Premium to Upper Class.
Reward availability is required in the upgraded cabin.
You need to pay the difference in taxes and charges.
The voucher cannot be redeemed online. You must call the contact centre to redeem it.
It can be applied on tickets issued by travel agencies too – you don’t have to book directly from Virgin Atlantic, which is good as they don’t have best rate guarantee.
You can redeem the voucher for someone else – you don’t have to travel.
[Calculating the charges]
To know how much you need to pay for the upgrade is easy. Say that you want to upgrade a one-way flight from London to Miami, then just search any date for that route on Virgin’s website. Select a flight and cabin then you’ll see ticket price on the next page:
See Taxes, fees and charges? It’s not the whole picture though, you must click the link to view the actual breakdown, which will show you the carrier-imposed surcharge too:
The two numbers combined are payable charges for a reward ticket. And in this case:
- Economy: £120 + £169 = £289
- Premium: £120 + £270 = £390
- Upper Class: £350 + 270 = £620
Which means you must pay £101 for upgrading from Economy to Premium, or £230 from Premium to Upper Class.
[Using the Voucher]
The first thing you need to ensure is reward availability in the cabin you want to upgrade to. Since Virgin Atlantic doesn’t guarantee reward seats on any flight, you may need to search their website often or subscribe to one of the alerting services.
Once you find it:
- For reward ticket, you don’t need an existing booking, simply call in to make the booking with points and voucher
- For revenue ticket, you don’t need any Virgin points, just call in to upgrade with the voucher
Since fuel surcharges are sky high at the moment, upgrading a revenue ticket usually turns out a much better deal.
Virgin Atlantic actually has a Gold service line which isn’t publicised on their website. However if you are a Gold member you should be able to find the 0800 number in any newsletter they sent you. I wasn’t aware and just called the regular number at 7pm on Wednesday. It took 25 minutes to get through, which wasn’t too bad.
The agent could see reward availability and my upgrade voucher no problem. She asked for my credit card details to pay the £230 charge, which is identical to my calculations above.
It’d be nice to be able to redeem the voucher online, but overall the contact centre experience was smooth and positive, and I think paying £230 for an upgrade to Upper Class, plus finally finding a use for that voucher feels really good!
Earn voucher or Virgin points on restaurant dining via SquareMeal
We wrote about IHG’s partnership with OpenTable which allows you to earn IHG points when making restaurant reservations. It turns out that OpenTable isn’t the oligarch in the industry and SquareMeal provides a very similar service.
SquareMeal has a wide range of business operations, but we’ll just focus on the dining part today. Basically:
- You earn 100 points for each restaurant reservation
- You also earn points when dining at select restaurants and paying with linked cards
For the second perk, you can search on their website and filter by Restaurants With Reward Offers:
You need to link a debit card or credit card (Visa / Mastercard / Amex) to your SquareMeal account. If you put enough spend through the designated card at participating restaurants you’ll earn a bonus. You don’t have to reserve via SquareMeal in this case, but there aren’t many participating venues.
You can opt to earn one of the two kinds of points:
- SquareMeal Points: 100 points = £1, and the voucher can be redeemed at participating restaurants
- Virgin Points
The first option sounds better value to me, providing that the vouchers are easy to exchange and redeem. Don’t forget to weight in the 150 IHG points from OpenTable in your equation.
The following are some ways to earn points:
- Sign up with my referral link and reserve once to earn 300 points
- Add your first debit / credit card to earn 100 points
- Earn 100 points every time you reserve a restaurant
- Earn 25 points every time you write a review
Of course, you must show up to your reservation to earn the points.
Virgin Atlantic Points Booster 40% bonus promotion (0.71p)
Virgin Atlantic has brought back its Points Booster promotion, which is a cheap way to bag some Virgin points.
You could check out the offer here. If you partake by April 22, you’ll earn up to 40% bonus on top of your usual points.
Points Booster is a special feature of Virgin Atlantic which allows you to purchase points when you have a past or upcoming booking with them. They are normally priced at 1p per point, and you can purchase either 1x, 2x or 3x of the flight distance (in miles).
For example, London Heathrow to New York JFK is 3,458 miles in distance, which means if you have a one-way flight booked, you can purchase either 3,458 points (£34.58), 6,916 points (£69.16) or 10,374 points (£103.74) under the usual circumstances. You will receive 20%, 30% or 40% bonus respectively, and with 40% bonus it works out at 0.71p per point, which is an excellent deal.
Beware that Virgin Atlantic (and BA) has recently increased their surcharges on award tickets though, so make sure you are still happy about the total cost before jumping on board.
For upcoming flights you could simply do it online, but for retroactive flights flown within the last six months you need to call the customer service. Both revenue and award tickets are eligible, and despite what the terms say, from my previous experience you could boost flights operated by partner airlines too, or for award tickets issued by Virgin Atlantic at least.
You should receive the bonus points soon-ish, but the original booster points won’t be credited until after the flight’s flown. Note that Points Booster purchases are final and non-refundable – the points will hit your account even if you cancel the flight ticket.
10% off and Virgin Points on Morrisons Groceries
A few offers just started circulating for grocery shopping in Morrisons – and even better, they would actually work as a nice discount for a great deal of other retailers too.
First up is American Express. Some of us have received a 10% cashback offer on the cards:
Others have received a variant of 7% instead. The minimum spend is £30 and the good thing is it’s valid every time until April 7.
For those who didn’t qualify for the offer or without an Amex, you can benefit equally through Airtime. They’ve got (almost) the same offer:
With some people receiving 10% and the others 7%. Remember that Airtime takes much longer to pay out though and it can only be redeemed against your mobile phone bills.
Even better, either of them can stack with the in-store offer on Virgin Shops Away, which should be another 6 or 8 points per £1 on your spend.
Last but not least, despite what the terms might say, you’ll earn cashback and bonus points on gift card purchase as well, or at least it’s how it worked previously. So even if you don’t shop at Morrisons, you may still want to stop by and grab a few Amazon, Uber, John Lewis (Waitrose) or One4all gift cards .
Get Virgin Atlantic Silver status with one short-haul return!
When we wrote about the Flying Blue programme, we mentioned its partnership with Virgin Atlantic and a trick for you to get Virgin Atlantic status very quickly. Let me elaborate on it today.
