While exploring Seats.Aero the other day, Greg noticed that there is quite a bit of really well-priced business class award space on Virgin Atlantic to Europe, particularly for those looking to travel in early 2026. Keep in mind that Virgin Atlantic has now adopted dynamic pricing, whereby both the number of miles and the surcharges are dynamic, but in some instances you can pay as few as 29,000 points and as little as about $254 for business class awards to the UK and beyond.
The Deal
- Virgin Atlantic Flying Club has excellent business class award space available on its own flights starting as low as 29,000 points one-way.
- Search at VirginAtlantic.com to find availability. See up to a year of availability at a time with a pro subscription to Seats.Aeroⓘ Disclosure Frequent Miler may earn a commission if you click through from this link and make a purchase.
Quick Thoughts
Business class pricing is now variable with Virgin Atlantic. It should come as no surprise that the best pricing is available in January, which I would imagine is low season in the UK. I’m seeing quite a bit of availability from a number of different cities to both London and Manchester for as few as 29,000 points and about $254 in business class in early 2026.
While the search below shows the price for 1 seat, I double-checked to be sure that the flight below does indeed have nine seats in business class from Washington-Dulles (IAD) to London (LHR) for just 29K points each (as I saw at Seats.aero).
Oddly, on some days, Upper Class (Virgin Atlantic’s name for business class) costs fewer points than premium economy (and just 2K more than economy class)! Surcharges are a bit higher, but this is nonetheless a great deal.
In some cases, I even found connecting itineraries with advantageous pricing, like this one from Washington-Dulles (IAD) to London on Virgin Atlantic in Upper Class followed by a leg on KLM to Amsterdam (AMS) for 37K points one and a few more bucks in taxes and fees way.
You may find some reasonable deals for travel even further afield, though I found a limited number of exciting deals beyond getting to Europe.
Again, you can search for this space on Virgin Atlantic’s website pretty easily, though I find seats.aero to be more convenient since you can essentially search anywhere in North America to Europe at once. That said, keep in mind that the Explore tool on Seats.aero is showing cached results, so you’ll sometimes find that the seats they found a few hours ago may have been snapped up before you got to them. Still, at the time of writing, I’ve only landed on one that was no longer available at the price they showed (and the price of that one had only gone up to 32K points!). That will obviously change as more people book, but it’s worth knowing that there is a lot of reasonably-priced space.
While you may not want to spend January being a tourist in London or Manchester, this could be a very reasonable way to get to Europe for those looking to ski / visit family / etc.
Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
The problem is getting back to the US without paying the high surcharges if you fly through London.
You could have mentioned in the headline itself that this is for 2026, and saved our time..
It’s not only in 2026, just mostly in 2026. And that’s in the first sentence, so I don’t imagine it took a lot of time to find that? Apologize if that took longer than anticipated to read.
Also plenty of days for a little bit more as well.
Check the aircraft because some routes and days use the A330-300. It is lie flat but not as nice as the A330-900neo. Also note that booking round trip will cost the same in total points but can cost more in total fees than booking the individual one-way flights.
Winter is a great time to visit the Lake District, an easy drive from Manchester.