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How to earn Virgin Points at your favourite restaurants with SquareMeal

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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.

Earn Virgin Points with Squaremeal

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.

In theory you are ‘buying’ Virgin Points at 1p each by giving up SquareMeal points.

In reality, SquareMeal points are quite restrictive and expire quickly. Virgin Points are likely to be a better deal irrespective of what you think of the valuation.

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.

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.

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 or app you earn at least 100 Virgin Points.

Earn bonus points at selected restaurants:

Some restaurants offer generous bonuses when you book via SquareMeal. Here’s an example:

Square Meal special offers

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.


How to earn Virgin Points from UK credit cards

How to earn Virgin Points from UK credit cards (March 2025)

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):

Virgin Atlantic Reward+ Mastercard

18,000 bonus points and 1.5 points for every £1 you spend Read our full review

Virgin Atlantic Reward Mastercard

3,000 bonus points, no fee and 1 point for every £1 you spend Read our full review

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.

American Express Preferred Rewards Gold

Your best beginner’s card – 30,000 points, FREE for a year & four airport lounge passes Read our full review

The Platinum Card from American Express comes with 50,000 Membership Rewards points, which convert into 50,000 Virgin Points.

The Platinum Card from American Express

80,000 bonus points and great travel benefits – for a large fee Read our full review

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

American Express Business Platinum

Up to 120,000 points when you sign-up and an annual £200 Amex Travel credit Read our full review

American Express Business Gold

Up to 60,000 points sign-up bonus and FREE for a year Read our full review

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

Comments (7)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • Sarah says:

    Just signed up. I also got 100 points for adding a card, 100 points for downloading the app, and 500 bonus points for signing up via Rob’s referral a friend link. Thanks Rob!

    • mkcol says:

      Funny I couldn’t see a referral link when I set mine up this morning to pass on, and also didn’t get the 500 you did despite using Rob’s link.
      I suspect I’ll survive though 😂

  • CamFlyer says:

    I’ve been using this since the original post a few years back. These days I see very few bonus point opportunities; it’s usually only the 100 points for booking.

    It does seem tonpost more reliable that the IHG points for their OpenTable engine.

    • phantomchickenz says:

      I’ve had a few points from bookings, but never received any from actual spend, so don’t bother anymore

  • Colin_Thames says:

    If you’ve already signed up before there doesn’t seem to be a way to switch to Virgin points, just Restaurant vouchers, gifts or charity.
    Is Virgin Points a feature only for new signups?

  • Colin_Thames says:

    Thanks Rob.
    The first time I tried that link it came up with an error but the second time it worked. Weird that option wasn’t offered through any of the menus but my virgin account is now linked. Thank you.

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

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