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, cruises or experiences?

This article is the first part of our 2025 updated ‘Virgin Redemption University’ series, which deals with the move to dynamic reward pricing. Further articles will follow over the next four weekends 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 (18,000 bonus points) and our review of the free Virgin Atlantic Reward Mastercard credit card is here (3,000 bonus points).

SPECIAL OFFER: Until 13th October 2025, the sign-up bonus on the Virgin Atlantic Reward+ Mastercard is doubled to 36,000 Virgin Points. You need to spend £3,000 within three months. Existing holders of the free card qualify. T&C apply. Click here to apply.

SPECIAL OFFER: Until 13th October 2025, the sign-up bonus on the free Virgin Atlantic Reward Mastercard is doubled to 6,000 Virgin Points. You need to spend £1,000 within three months. Existing holders of the paid card qualify. T&C apply. Click here to apply.

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 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.

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.

The key is to keep an eye out for the gems. You could have had a day out (in port) with unlimited food and drink on the new Virgin Voyages cruise ship ‘Brilliant Lady’ for 7,500 points a few weeks ago, for example. My daughter was exceptionally happy on Thursday after I got her two tickets for the Virgin Red Room suite at The O2 to see Radiohead in November.

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 use this link to download the app you will receive 1,000 bonus Virgin Points after your first transaction.

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 should you 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, both with Virgin Atlantic and its – increasingly popular – SkyTeam and non-alliance partners.

This is what we see as the best redemption option. Visit HfP tomorrow for the next part in this series.