Register by September 30 to receive Virgin Hotels emails and get 500 Virgin America Elevate points.

Offer valid until September 30th, 2016. Only one email address is allowed and only one set of 500 points will be awarded per Elevate number. Bonus reward points earned in this offer do not qualify towards Elevate Gold or Elevate Silver status. Please allow 10 days for your points to post from the promotion end date.

If nothing else it should extend the expiration of any Virgin America points you have in your account already by 18 months.

You can use the points for about 2.2 cents apiece towards travel on Virgin America, or for fixed-point redemptions on their partners. So 500 points are worth ~ $11. You can get more value than that with partner awards.

Virgin America points though are actually quite easy to get. You can transfer Starwood points 1:1 into Virgin America (plus the usual bonus for transferring into 20,000 points).

My rule of thumb is that Virgin America’s points are deflated, that one Virgin America point is worth about 2 points in a European airline frequent flyer program. (And indeed it takes 2 American Express points usually to get 1 Virgin America Elevate point.)

Virgin America is being acquired by Alaska Airlines so these should eventually become Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles if you don’t redeem them first. That’s probably 18-24 months into the future, and I’m hopeful that they will be converted at 1 -> 2 (which would make this worth 1000 Alaska miles).

(HT: Frequent Flyer Bonuses)