Frequent Miler's latest team challenge, Million Mile Madness, is almost done! The last two weeks Greg, Nick, and Stephen competed to earn 1 Million SAS miles by flying 15 airlines. But who completed the challenge with the most Speed, Affordability, and Style?
The Virgin Group has announced that in 2019, they’ll be launching a new Virgin-wide loyalty program that’ll use Virgin Atlantic’s Flying Club miles as the currency.
The email they’ve sent out says the following:
Today we’re announcing that Virgin Group and Virgin Atlantic have agreed to create a new company that will launch a Virgin-wide loyalty programme, to reward customer loyalty across Virgin branded companies with unique and differentiated reward opportunities.
The new loyalty programme will use the Flying Club currency, ‘miles’ and will bring you more opportunities to earn miles, with the result of getting you to Reward Flights sooner. The new loyalty programme plans to launch in 2019 and I look forward to writing to you about the benefits of joining this programme closer to the time.
Flying Club will continue as the frequent flyer programme for Virgin Atlantic’s customers and you will continue to earn and spend miles across Virgin Atlantic, Delta Air Lines and a range of airline and other partners as you do today. And in the future you can look forward to an expanded range of valuable ways to earn and spend miles that will be powered by the new Virgin loyalty programme.
There’s also a link to some FAQs, but those don’t provide much insight into how the new program works. On the positive side, the FAQs confirm that you’ll be able to continue earning tier points and earn and redeem miles for flights with Virgin Atlantic, Delta and other airline partners. It doesn’t state either way though as to whether or not redemption costs will change, so it remains to be seen as to whether or not this will lead to a devaluation adorned with some minor positive changes.
This is unlikely to be too exciting for those of us based in the US seeing as there aren’t that many Virgin brands available over here. That said, it might mean that those with Virgin Mobile service earn Flying Club miles each month.
Things could be more interesting for those in my home country of the UK. There, Virgin has their fingers in a ton of pies from savings accounts to cable and internet services to trains to fitness clubs and much more. If you were to earn miles when using any of those services, that could certainly engender even more brand loyalty.
Needless to say, we’ll keep you updated as and when more announcements are made.
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From the US point of view, I guess the most important thing to know is going to be when the new program is going live as it will most likely devalue mileage redemptions. VS is where I transferred Marriott TP miles with intent of using it on November 2019 redemption so can only hope the new program will not go into effect until early 2019.