Wells Fargo announced today that it’s added Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Red as its newest transfer partner on a 1:1 basis. Even better, there’s no minimum transfer amount.
You can find the full announcement here. When going to the transfer partners page for your eligible Wells Fargo credit card (Autograph Journey), you’ll see two Virgin options:
- Virgin Atlantic Flying Club – this will appear in the ‘Airline’ category
- Virgin Red – this will be in its own ‘Travel and Experiences’ category
In case you’re not familiar with how Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Red accounts work, you can link those two accounts, with those points effectively transferring to each other on a 1:1 basis also. That means that you can redeem Virgin points for Virgin Atlantic flights (or flights on partners), while also being able to redeem points for other Virgin services.
What’s particularly useful with this Wells Fargo partnership is that transfers start from only 1 point. Most transferable currencies require a minimum transfer of 1,000 points, with higher transfers having to be made in 1,000 point increments. That’s not the case with Wells Fargo/Virgin – you can transfer any amount. That’s useful because it means that you can transfer the precise number of points you need, rather than having to transfer in thousand point increments and having orphaned points left in your account.
Transfers should be instant, but Virgin does caution that it could take up to 72 hours to reflect in your Virgin account.
As a reminder, when Wells Fargo launched its new transferable points program back in April it had the following transfer partners:
- Air France/KLM Flying Blue
- British Airway Executive Club Avios
- Aer Lingus AerClub Avios
- Iberia Plus Avios
- Avianca LifeMiles
- Choice Privileges
The addition of Virgin to the program isn’t too surprising as Virgin is a transfer partner of every other major transferable points currency, but it’s good to see Wells Fargo expanding its transfer partner list nonetheless; hopefully we’ll see even more additions in the coming year.
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Emirates, Etihad, and Singapore please. Throw in LHW for Greg. 🙂
Is there any reason to believe that Wells Fargo will ever do a transfer bonus to any of its partners? Otherwise the most useful use of the Wells Fargo currency might be to correct round off errors.necessitated by other transferrable currencies that only transfer in larger increments.
I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if they decided to do transfer bonuses in the future, but they also haven’t given any indication that they plan to do this at any point.
It is still early in the process. I assume they are just trying to build interest in their program. I wouldn’t expect transfer bonuses right away, but soon they will have to do some to be competitive.
I was beginning to be worried that they would not do more. They could use one more each from Star Alliance and OneWorld (Avios is really all one program). I’m not sure Air Canada is in the cards for them, but even something like Turkish or Singapore would be fine. Among the OneWorld carriers, I’m ambivalent on Qantas vs. Cathay. But two each for the alliances seems to be in the realm of reasonable.
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