Frequent Miler's latest team challenge, Million Mile Madness, is happening now! Follow us as Greg, Nick, and Stephen compete to earn 1 Million SAS miles by flying 15 airlines before November 23rd. Who will complete the challenge with the most Speed, Affordability, and Style?
Update 1/23/24: Virgin Red has adjusted voucher pricing so that the value per point is consistent with any voucher amount. This still isn’t a good redemption in the sense that the value per point is extremely low, but this at least improves the value proposition for the $25-$100 vouchers over where they were when it launched.
Virgin Red has announced today that members can now use Virgin Points to travel by train with Eurostar, but the value is so atrocious that you should not consider using your points this way.
The Deal
- Virgin Red has announced that starting today members can redeem Virgin Points for Eurostar train vouchers in the following increments:
- $10 E-Voucher – 2,000 points (0.5c per point)
- $25 E-Voucher – 5,000 points (0.5c per point)
- $50 E-Voucher – 10,00 points (0.5c per point)
- $100 E-Voucher – 20,000 points (0.5c per point)
- Direct link to this deal
Quick Thoughts
The eVoucher credits here offer positively awful value for points at half a cent or less per point. It is particularly comical that a five $10 vouchers would cost 10,000 points but if you instead buy a $50 voucher it’ll cost you 12,500 points. If you wanted to use 12,000 points, why wouldn’t you buy six $10 vouchers and have $60? Update 1/23/24: Virgin Red has adjusted the pricing so that the value is consistent across the vouchers. This is still a low-value redemption, but it no longer makes more sense to buy $10 vouchers — all of the denominations offer the same value per point.
You shouldn’t be accepting this kind of awful value for your hard-earned points. Virgin points can be far, far more valuable when used toward flights, whether on Virgin Atlantic (which currently has an award sale) or on partners like Delta or Air France or occasionally for cruises when available (See: Best uses for Virgin Points across Virgin Atlantic & Virgin Red (Sweet Spot Spotlight) for more on best uses). It should not be difficult to do much better than 1c per point when used toward other types of travel (and in some cases you can get far more). You certainly shouldn’t consider transferring points from a transferable currency (which in most cases can easily be cashed out for a value of 1c per point or more) to Virgin for Eurostar vouchers. I can’t imagine redeeming 50,000 Virgin points for two $100 Eurostar vouchers when those same 50,000 points could potentially snag Delta One business class from the US to Europe.
I’m all about having more ways to redeem your points, and to some extent poor-value redemptions likely help subsidize good ones. Just be sure you don’t fall into the trap of looking at these as “free” train tickets because the value you’re giving up to get those train tickets is pretty awful.
Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
Hey Nick, is there a way that you can book a Eurostar train ticket using any kind of points that would be at a reasonable value? The reason why I ask is because it seems like most Eurostar tickets are nonrefundable unless you buy a business class ticket and I’m looking for an option where I can cancel or change without a penalty. Thanks.
This doesn’t help on the cancellation aspect, but Eurostar tickets can be changed to a different date/time with only the difference in fare charged if the change is done at least seven days in advance. Worth noting that you have to stay in the same class of service (so can’t go from Standard Premier to Standard, nor do I think you can upgrade from Standard to Standard Premier) and keep the same origin and destination (so if you’re going from Paris to London, you can’t change it to Paris to Brussels, or Brussels to London, or even London to Paris!) It’s annoyingly restrictive in some aspects, but it’s not a fully locked-in ticket either given that you could keep pushing out the trip until the city pairs work should you need to “cancel” and reschedule.