How to earn Virgin Points at your favourite restaurants with SquareMeal

Virgin Red has a partnership with SquareMeal, the restaurant booking service, to allow you to earn Virgin Points when you eat out.

There are four ways to earn.

You can, as you would expect, earn 100 points when you book a restaurant via the SquareMeal website. You can get an extra 25 points by leaving a review afterwards.

You can earn additional bonus points at certain restaurants for hitting spend criteria or visiting on selected days.

More interestingly, you can earn up to 3,000 bonus points when you pay with a registered credit card at selected restaurants – even if you didn’t book via SquareMeal.

How does the offer work?

If you don’t already have a SquareMeal account, you can register via this page of the SquareMeal website.

During registration, you will be asked if you want to earn SquareMeal points, worth 1p each towards future meal bookings, or Virgin Points.

• If you say ‘SquareMeal points’, you will earn 200 SquareMeal points when you register

• If you say ‘Virgin Points’, you don’t get any bonus

However, if you say ‘SquareMeal points’ and then switch to Virgin Points when your account is active, your 200 SquareMeal points do NOT get turned into Virgin Points. Will you ever use them for anything? No idea!

Already got a SquareMeal account?

Log in and head to your profile. You’ll see that you can switch from earning SquareMeal points to Virgin Points.

As far as I can tell, your existing points balance will NOT be converted. Only future points earned will be sent to Virgin Red.

You need a Virgin Red account

In order to earn Virgin Points from SquareMeal, you need a Virgin Red account. It isn’t enough to have a Virgin Flying Club account.

If you are not already registered with Virgin Red, download their app, create an account and link it to your Virgin Flying Club account. You should do this anyway, as Virgin Red has lots of additional ways to earn and spend Virgin Points.

SquareMeal will ask for the email address linked to your Virgin Red account as part of the registration process.

How do I earn Virgin Points with SquareMeal?

There are three routes:

100 Virgin Points for every booking:

Each time you make a restaurant booking via the website (there is no app), you earn at least 100 Virgin Points.

Earn bonus points at selected restaurants:

Some restaurants offer generous bonuses when you book via Square Meal. Here is what you get at Monica Galetti’s Mere, for example:

Review a restaurant:

Each time you review a restaurant you have booked via the site, you earn 25 Virgin Points.

Benefit from card linked offers:

Each time you dine at a restaurant with an exclusive card-linked offer running, you receive up to 3,000 Virgin Points – even if you didn’t book by SquareMeal. You must register your credit card on the SquareMeal website to trigger these bonuses. Remember that you don’t need to have booked via SquareMeal.

Conclusion

SquareMeal doesn’t have the range of OpenTable – it is primarily used for booking business lunches – but it offers an easy way of picking up some extra Virgin Points.

This is especially true of the card linked offers, where you can pick up Virgin Points simply by linking your payment cards to your SquareMeal profile. You never need to visit the site again if you choose, and you may pick up the odd chunk of points when dining out.

You can register here.

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How to earn Virgin Points from UK credit cards (September 2023)

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 15,000 Virgin Points):

SPECIAL OFFER: The sign-up bonus on the Virgin Atlantic Reward+ Mastercard is doubled to 30,000 Virgin Points if you apply by 2nd October. You receive 15,000 Virgin Points with your first purchase and a further 15,000 points if you spend £3,000 within 90 days. Apply here.

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 30,000 Membership Rewards points, which convert into 30,000 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.)