Use Virgin Flying Club miles for Clubhouse lounge spa treatments – and no more free haircuts

Virgin Atlantic has launched a new way to pay for your spa treatments at the Clubhouse lounges in Heathrow Terminal 3 and Gatwick – by using your Flying Club miles.

Full details can be found on the Virgin Atlantic website here.

As the site says:

How about a facial to prepare your skin for altitude? Just 3,000 miles. A shave to get rid of that 5 o’clock shadow? Just 4,000 miles, including a hot towel, cleanse and moisturise. Or how about a gorgeous Thai foot massage for only 7,000 miles? There are lots of lovely ways to spend your miles at the Clubhouse Spa – just make sure you leave enough time before your flight to fully indulge!

Here’s the bad but not surprising news – it is a bad deal.

You are getting exactly 0.5p per Flying Club mile when you redeem them for spa treatments.

This is not great.  You should be targeting 1p when using them for a flight redemption.

Of course, if you earn all your miles from flights then you might be ambivalent about the value you get.  Anyone earning miles from Virgin credit card spend, Tesco Clubcard transfers, American Express Membership Rewards transfers etc is unlikely to accept such a low valuation.

You can download menus for both the Heathrow and Gatwick spas at the same site.  One thing that jumped out is that men can no longer get a free haircut.  I’m not sure when this was dropped but I had one when I was in the Clubhouse last Summer.

Free treatments are now restricted to, at Heathrow:

Creative dry style female hair treatment (15 minutes)

Fringe trim (ladies only) (15 minutes)

Beard trim (15 minutes)

Neck tidy (men only) (15 minutes)

File and buff for hands and nails (15 minutes)

Express Radiant You facial (15 minutes)

Head massage (15 minutes)

You can take one free treatment, with additional ones charged at £16 or 3,000 miles.

PS.  Despite the picture above, Virgin removed the spa from the Clubhouse lounge at Heathrow a couple of years ago.  To be honest, I always found it a bit weird – despite how the picture looks, it wasn’t in a private room, just tucked around a corner.  The real reason I never tried it is that I never flew Virgin on any trip where I thought I’d need trunks ….

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How to earn Virgin Points from UK credit cards (April 2024)

As a reminder, there are various ways of earning Virgin Points from UK credit cards.  Many cards also have generous sign-up bonuses.

You can choose from two official Virgin Atlantic credit cards (apply here, the Reward+ card has a bonus of 18,000 Virgin Points and the free card has a bonus of 3,000 Virgin Points):

You can also earn Virgin Points from various American Express cards – and these have sign-up bonuses too.

American Express Preferred Rewards Gold is FREE for a year and comes with 20,000 Membership Rewards points, which convert into 20,000 Virgin Points.

The Platinum Card from American Express comes with 40,000 Membership Rewards points, which convert into 40,000 Virgin Points.

Small business owners should consider the two American Express Business cards. Points convert at 1:1 into Virgin Points.

Click here to read our detailed summary of all UK credit cards which earn Virgin Points. 

(Want to earn more Virgin Points?  Click here to see our recent articles on Virgin Atlantic and Flying Club and click here for our home page with the latest news on earning and spending other airline and hotel points.)