How to earn Virgin Atlantic Silver and Gold status flying with KLM and Air France

This is your guide to earning Virgin Flying Club tier points from flights on Air France and KLM.

We know that a lot of HfP readers, especially outside the Heathrow catchment area, do the majority of their SkyTeam flying on Air France or KLM rather than Virgin Atlantic.

However, there are reasons why you may want to credit your flights to Virgin Flying Club rather than Flying Blue, the Air France / KLM scheme.

For a start, having Silver or Gold status in Virgin Flying Club means that the annual voucher you receive from the Virgin Atlantic credit cards is worth 150,000 Virgin Points rather than the standard 75,000 points.

This article looks at how many Virgin Atlantic tier points you earn when flying with Air France and KLM.

Details are below, but you can also find the Air France tier point earning chart on this page of the Virgin Atlantic website and the KLM tier point earning chart on this page.

You don’t need to fly with Virgin Atlantic to earn Virgin Flying Club status

It is worth remembering that there is NO minimum Virgin Atlantic flight requirement with Virgin Flying Club.  You can earn Virgin Atlantic status ENTIRELY from Air France and KLM flying if you wish.

A simple guide to earning Virgin Atlantic status with Air France and KLM

Let’s look at the Virgin Atlantic tier point system, which is outlined on its website here.

Virgin Flying Club is tiered like this:

• Red – sign-up level

• Silver – requires 400 tier points per year, key benefits are free seat selection seven days before departure when flying Economy, Premium check-in (where Premium desks exist), priority boarding, ability to gift annual credit card vouchers to other people, Virgin Hotels benefits, 30% mileage bonus on Virgin Atlantic / Air France / KLM / Delta flights, SkyTeam Elite status

• Gold – requires 1,000 tier points year.  This is where the real benefits kick in – Upper Class check-in, extra baggage allowance, free Economy seat selection at any time, 60% mileage bonus on Virgin / Air France / KLM / Delta, lounge access, birthday points bonus, Silver status for a friend, arrivals lounge access at Heathrow, reward voucher upon renewal, SkyTeam Elite Plus status

How does the Virgin Atlantic tier point system work?

Here is a reminder of how you earn tier points with Virgin Atlantic.

Whilst British Airways has moved to a revenue-based system for earning status, Virgin Atlantic has not. You know in advance how many tier points you will earn – the price you pay for your ticket has no impact.

Virgin Atlantic and British Airways work slightly differently when you first earn status.  With Virgin, your past activity as a Red member is counted on a ROLLING 12 month basis without fixed membership dates.

Once you hit 400 tier points within the past 12 months (to be precise, 12 months plus the entire first month, so today it would consider 1st July 2024 to 13th July 2025) your membership expiry date is fixed.  You need to hit 400 or 1,000 tier points within the next 12 months to renew Silver or reach Gold.

When heading from Red to Gold, your tier points are reset to zero when you hit 400 and become Silver.  However, you are then given Gold when you hit 600 tier points – you do not need to earn 1,000 for the first year.

This is what you earn when you fly with Virgin Atlantic (we will come to Air France and KLM earning in a minute):

• Upper Class (G, Z) – 100 tier points each way
• Upper Class (J, C, D, I) – 200 tier points each way
• Premium (H, K, P) – 50 tier points each way
• Premium (W, S) – 100 tier points each way
• Economy Delight (V) – 50 tier points each way
• Economy Classic (A, E, Q, X, N, O) – 25 tier points each way
• Economy Classic (L, U, M, Y, B, R) – 50 tier points each way
• Economy Light (T) – 25 tier points each way

Renewing Gold would require as few as five one-way Upper Class flights per year as long as they were on flexible or semi-flexible tickets.

How many Virgin tier points do you earn with Air France and KLM?

The tier point earning chart is here on the Virgin Atlantic website for Air France and here for KLM and I have copied it below. Note that the numbers are different if you are flying on a Virgin Atlantic codeshare flight (ie your ticket has a VS flight number but your flight is operated by Air France or KLM).

Earning Virgin Flying Club tier points with Air France

Here is the table (click to enlarge):

The cut-offs are:

• 601+ miles for mid-haul
• 1,751+ miles for long-haul

If you are booking a heavily discounted Economy ticket, check that it is in a category which qualifies for tier points.

Earning Virgin Flying Club tier points with KLM

Here is the table (click to enlarge):

The cut-offs are:

• 601+ miles for mid-haul
• 1,751+ miles for long-haul

If you are booking a heavily discounted Economy ticket, check that it is in a category which qualifies for tier points.

Here are a few thoughts about the tier point tables

Here are two things to note:

• Air France First Class (La Premiere) is not treated any more generously than flexible Business Class, although not that many people fly it – it is far more exclusive than BA First Class and rarely discounted

• the 1,751 miles cut-off for maximum tier points is interesting. Before British Airways Club was launched, BA used to use 2,000 miles as its cut-off between short-haul and long-haul. Even though Amsterdam and Paris are nearer most destinations in EMEA than London, the lower cut-off point means that routes which used to earn 80 BA tier points probably earn the higher level of Virgin Atlantic tier points.

Conclusion

As you can see from the charts above, it is relatively easy to earn status in Virgin Flying Club purely from flying Air France or KLM.

Virgin Silver could be yours for as little as one return long haul business class flight on a flexible ticket. Looking at short haul, a cheap business class return from, say, Manchester to Rome via Amsterdam would get 100 tier points return. If you doing this route monthly then you would easily earn Virgin Flying Club Gold status within a year.

Whether it is worth switching from Flying Blue to Virgin Flying Club is totally down to your flying patterns (travel class and routes) and how much value you place on earning Virgin Points instead of Flying Blue miles.