You can use these points for cruises, hotels and some really compelling deals on flights, of course. In this episode, we’ll discuss some of our favorite uses for Virgin Points.
Watch the full episode below, or listen on your favorite podcast platform. You can click the timestamps below to navigate directly to a specific part of the episode within YouTube.
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Main Event: Best uses for Virgin points
Mailbag
(01:12) – Tips for using AutoSlash for car rentals…
Card News
(06:34) – The Amex Gold card’s Dunkin’ benefits can apparently be used at Baskin Robbins!
Read more about the Amex Gold Card here.
Award Talk
(09:41) – Qatar devaluation impacts using Qatar Avios to book American & Alaska
(13:50) – Read more about award ticket change and cancellation fees here.
(15:46) – LifeMiles devaluation (not all bad news)
(17:28) – Catch our Learning to Love LifeMiles episode 257 here.
(18:48) – Air France/KLM is bookable again with Virgin Points
Main Event: Best uses for Virgin points
(21:40) – Virgin Red & Virgin Atlantic Flying Club share same points, just link your accounts
(22:13) – It’s easy to get Virgin Points
(22:33) – Learn more about frequent transfer bonuses here.
(22:55) – Learn more about the Virgin Red credit card here.
(23:03) – Delta One to Europe is effectively dead
(24:20) – Now, fly Air France / KLM short distances in/near Europe
(29:20) – Fly Air France/KLM to/from Europe
(32:55) – Economy to/from London (fly Delta or Virgin Atlantic)
(35:33) – Learn more about Virgin Voyages here.
(39:23) – Read Nick’s post on getting free cruises from status matches here.
(42:19) – More rare Virgin Point deals…
Question of the Week
(47:09) – What do you do when a Marriott nightly upgrade award would put you in a suite with a lower room occupancy than the lower, standard room (and a lower occupancy rate than you need)?
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Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie Yoder
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Thanks for highlighting the Flying Blue sweet spot with Virgin points – should be obvious but sometimes you forget to check. Not a lot but I found a few dates from home airport going US to Europe where Virgin came out cheaper on both points and the taxes & fees than Flying Blue for the same AF flight.
Don’t know that it counts as “outstanding” value but I was pleased with booking Hawaiian Airlines business (first) class for 40K Virgin points one way between the mainland and Hawaii. Worked out to about 3 cpp. For someone doing a first time bigger partner redemption it was pretty smooth as Virgin’s customer service line was actually good and quick at getting things processed.
Just want to clarify that Priceline VIP member is free and is just the Priceline frequent traveler program. At the bottom tier you are just a Member. Like the person that wrote in, we also have used Autoslash with Priceline as it seems to generally be the lowest rate. We don’t rent cars to much, but we do always put the Car Rental FF number in the reservation and we have always had the reservations show up with Hertz, Budget, etc. We so rarely rent cars though, I’ve never really paid attention if the reservation still accrue rental car points.
No mention of Virgin stays? Necker Island, Ulusaba Private Game Reserve, The Lodge (Switzerland), Kasbah Tamadot, Son Bonyola (Mallorca), Mahali Mzuri, and Mont Rochelle.
Other than Necker Island, these usually don’t offer good value for your points when compared to their cash rates. With Necker, you can get good value but currently it also requires a huge cash outlay.
Check out Kai’s interview with Logan on episode 69 of The Daily Churn podcast. Logan’s experience may convince you to take another look, at least at Ulusaba.
Just a little warning/feedback on the Virgin cruises: with points you are not buying the cruise directly; you end up requesting a voucher with your points, and then when you receive that you actually book your cruise. Data points online indicate you can receive the vouchers in a few hours to a few days. So there is a risk that the cruise you saw had openings when you transferred your points and requested your voucher may not be available by the time you actually book. You are also not going to a checkout screen that shows the taxes and fees (those you pay when you book with the voucher). I think if you do not use your voucher while it is valid, eventually you get the points back.
I am a little sour on the whole experience. Back in May they released a bunch of Voyages offers. I had the page open on my computer for a couple days while we confirmed that we had availability for a week in September for one of the Mediterranean cruises. The page remained active, updated my balance when I transferred over Amex MR, you could follow links to look up whether there was availability, etc. However, when I went to hit the button to buy the voucher, it errored out and said try again later. Tried a couple more times, same result. I went to the main page of the website, and found out that they changed the terms. From the main Virgin Red website, it now linked to a new page saying that only cruises through August (close in) were available. But instead of taking down the old page, or changing the text on the old page to say the new date range, they just removed the link and left the page online. I was so mad, since I already had transferred the Amex MR to Virgin.
In the end, we used the Virgin points to book Air New Zealand for that week. I would argue that this is not really a “unicorn” award. Yes, they are only bookable close in (they start to release space for a given flight 4 weeks ahead of time), but they have been releasing a good amount of space consistently for the past 2 years (we booked it about 1.5 years ago too). Looking on Seats.aero, there are dozens of options. Now I would consider Delta One availability through Virgin a unicorn, something that was not mentioned.
For some reason (probably EU rules) Virgin Red does not charge you for taxes and fees when you redeem points for the Europe sailings. Those are completely free. It does charge for the taxes/fees on redemption sailings departing from the US. Still a great use of points IMO.
I’ve successfully booked Virgin sweet spots. But, Virgin is plagued with tech issues. (As is BA. Is it a British thing?) And, at this point, I’ll only book award flights via Virgin for which I can easily book a backup flight. No single-point failures.