How does Virgin Red differ from Virgin Flying Club? (Virgin Redemption University #1)

How do you book flights using Virgin Points?  How do you book flights with partner airlines?  Is it worth redeeming Virgin Points for hotels, wine, car hire or experiences?

This article is the start of a new ‘Virgin Redemption University’ series to run alongside our existing ‘Avios Redemption University’ – which itself will get a much-needed update next month. Further articles will follow on different aspects of spending Virgin Points.

If you want to earn more Virgin Points, our review of the Virgin Atlantic Reward+ Mastercard credit card is here (15,000 bonus points) and our review of the free Virgin Atlantic Reward Mastercard credit card is here.

Here are the other 12 articles in the series:

• How many Virgin Points do you need to fly to ….?
• How to redeem Virgin Points on Virgin Atlantic flights
• How to redeem Virgin Points on SkyTeam flights
• How to redeem Virgin Points on ANA and other partners
• How to upgrade your Virgin Atlantic flight with Virgin Points
• How to convert Virgin Points to Hilton or IHG hotel points
• How to use Virgin Points for a Virgin Holidays discount
• How to redeem Virgin Points for hotel rooms via Kaligo
• Is Virgin Atlantic’s ‘Points Plus Money’ feature a good deal?
• What’s the best non-flying use of Virgin Points?
• What is the cheapest way to top up your Virgin Points?
• Get cheaper Virgin redemptions with a credit card voucher

Before we jump in with specific articles on how to spend your Virgin Points, we want to show you how Virgin Flying Club and Virgin Red fit into the Virgin Points jigsaw. You need to be a member of both to get full value from your points.

How do Virgin Flying Club and Virgin Red fit together?

Confusingly there are two places you can earn and spend Virgin Points – via Virgin Flying Club and via Virgin Red.

Legally, all Virgin Points are owned by Virgin Red. Virgin Atlantic is now a third party customer of Virgin Red, buying points from them when passengers fly and selling airline seats to Virgin Red when you book a flight.

What is Virgin Flying Club?

Virgin Flying Club is the frequent flyer programme of Virgin Atlantic. It operates like any other frequent flyer scheme, allowing you to earn and spend Virgin Points on flights as well as a handful of other opportunities.

You can also earn status in Virgin Flying Club – Silver or Gold – based on your flying activity with Virgin Atlantic and its SkyTeam airline partners.

You use the Virgin Flying Club website at virginatlantic.com, or the Virgin Flying Club call centre, for booking any flight rewards.

What is Virgin Red?

In 2020, Virgin Group launched Virgin Red as, primarily, a smartphone app to collect and spend Virgin Points. It is aimed at the general public, not frequent flyers.

There are no status levels inside Virgin Red. Even if you have elite status in Virgin Flying Club, it doesn’t make any difference to what you can do in the Virgin Red app. You can’t even see your Flying Club status level anywhere inside the Virgin Red app.

Virgin Red doesn’t have a lot to offer in terms of additional ways of earning Virgin Points. It is primarily an online shopping portal, offering you points for every £1 spent at a large variety of online retailers. It is directly competing with cashback sites such as TopCashback as well as other travel points shopping portals such as the BA eStore.

Virgin Red is a lot more interesting when it comes to new ways of spending Virgin Points. The company has put a lot of effort into finding new non-flying ways to spend, and we will look at some of the best in a future article in this series.

You need to be picky though. The majority of Virgin Red redemptions are worth a flat 0.5p per point you spend, which is poor value compared to a premium cabin flight reward.

You need to link your Virgin Flying Club and Virgin Red accounts

If you have a Virgin Flying Club account but not a Virgin Red account – which is the likely position for a HfP reader – you should know that you need to have both if you want to maximise options for spending your Virgin Points.

Download the Virgin Red app to your phone and follow the instructions to link it to your existing Virgin Flying Club account.

If you already have a Virgin Red account, open the app, click on ‘Account’ and then on ‘Link Accounts’. You can then input your Flying Club number.

You cannot reverse the linking process but I can’t think of any reason why you would want to.

You do NOT have separate Virgin Red and Virgin Flying Club points balances, unless you opened accounts with both without linking them. Once your two accounts are linked you only have one combined Virgin Points total which shows in both the Virgin Red app and on the Virgin Flying Club website.

Whilst outside the scope of this article, you can also link your Virgin Wines Discovery Club account to your Virgin Red account and earn Virgin Points on your purchases.

Note that only residents of the UK and US can join Virgin Red at the moment.

What you should redeem for?

Now that you have a linked Virgin Flying Club and Virgin Red account, you can redeem your Virgin Points for their full range of redemptions.

The future articles in this series will show you which redemptions are best. Unsurprisingly, the majority of the content will be showing you how to book flights with your Virgin Points. This is what we see – in the absence of any special deals elsewhere – as the best redemption option.

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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.)