25% Bonus on Transfers from Membership Rewards to Virgin Atlantic

by Gary Leff

Membership Rewards transfers to Virgin Atlantic will come with a 25% bonus from April 1 through May 15.

The offer should appear on the site and tell you how many miles you’ll receive for your transfer, inclusive of the 25% bonus. As I post this it isn’t up quite yet but should be working within a few hours.

Virgin has pretty darned good availability from most of its North American cities (New York-JFK, Newark, Boston, Washington Dulles, Miami, Orlando, Chicago, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Vancouver) to London, and also really good availability on to Africa as well. Its business class seat is excellent and will be refreshed as well. The downsides to Virgin are the very high fuel surcharges, which the mileage program assesses on award redemptions (as do most European and Asian programs), and that they’re a long-haul carrier so intra-European connections are often going to be purchased separately (they do partner with British Midland but presumably that partnership will end with British Airways’ acquisition of bmi). Their award chart is generally pricey, for non-stop roundtrips to London it’s quite good.

The program is actually pretty transparent, not just about miles but also about the taxes they charge, their online calculator shows both. For instance, business class roundtrip redemptions:

  • New York to London: 80,000 miles plus $887.10 taxes and fees
  • Los Angeles to London: 100,000 miles plus $963.10 taxes and fees
  • Chicago to Nairobi via London: 190,000 miles plus $1799.90 taxes and fees

Virgin has several airline partnerships, including for redemption, but you can’t combine partner airlines on awards and not all partner routes are available for redemption (for instance one of the more restrictive arrangements, with Air China, allows for redemption only between London and Beijing).

For me this represents a reasonable choice for topping off my Virgin account, I don’t concentrate on this program at all but I do accumulate points at a pretty decent clip because it’s my default airline for crediting one-day Avis rentals since those earn 1000 miles without any special deal or coupon code and is an ongoing offer.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

More articles by Gary Leff »

Comments

  1. I like that Virgin is transparent but, my goodness, those taxes are shocking.

  2. I wonder if this transfer bonus would be a viable option for getting trancons awards on Virgina America (ie, JFK-SFO using Virgin Atlantic points), since the Virgin Atlantic award chart displays 25k per roundtrip. Not sure if its always 25k per award or this is the “saver” level and the awards will be require more than 25k miles for booking.

    Has anyone tried booking since the “Virgins” united? How is Virgin America’s award availability?

  3. Any idea what taxes Hawaiian charges on VA redemptions? Is it the same as it the flight was booked with VA, or do they omit these surcharges?

  4. if only Virgin still had their 6k roundtrip interisland tickets on hawaiian avail..then i would jump at this…now that its gone Virgin is useless to me.

  5. Gary or anyone else- have a view on how many cents/mile Virgin Atlantic miles are worth?

Comments are closed.