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I was saving up my points, 180,000 plus for our golden wedding anniversary, I found out today that they expired in 2020, there was no communication to tell me that was going to happen! What a waste, we have flown with virgin 15 times to Barbados, and was planning another trip to celebrate our golden wedding and my 70 birthday, o well the robbing so and so can keep my miles, I’m now going with British Airways
Virgin Points don’t expire – ever.
However this may not have been the rule in 2020.
You can’t have flown with Virgin since at least 2017 because they wouldn’t have expired. Virgin is the outlier and the only major airline where points never expire. If you’ve ever collected any airline miles, ever, in your life you should have expected expiry.
You presumably haven’t even logged in to your account for five years if you hadn’t noticed ….
Troll detector is buzzing on this one….
So loyal to VS they havn’t flown with them for several years!
Even if VS points did expire these days there is no excuse in letting points expire as there are many methods that don’t actually involve flying where you can earn / spend in a qualifying way to extend validity.
I managed to keep my VS points live (not flown with them since something like 2016) by limking my credit card to Virgin Red and earning some points when I booked a national express coach or a train ticket.
@Col Quote from Virgin website – https://flywith.virginatlantic.com/us/en/flying-club/members/flying-club-news/exciting-changes-to-your-miles.html :
“As of 24th September 2020, Flying Club miles will never expire. They’ll also have a new name – Virgin Points. This change means that you can build up your Virgin Points balance for as long as you want, and enjoy rewards at your leisure – whenever you’re ready.”
@Rob’s article here: https://www.headforpoints.com/2020/09/24/goodbye-virgin-flying-club-miles-hello-virgin-points/Sadly it seems you may have lost the points before the 24/09/20 changeover date
On a happier note, congratulations on your golden wedding anniversary and the milestone birthday 🙂
And welcome!
I was saving up my points, 180,000 plus for our golden wedding anniversary, I found out today that they expired in 2020, there was no communication to tell me that was going to happen! What a waste, we have flown with virgin 15 times to Barbados, and was planning another trip to celebrate our golden wedding and my 70 birthday, o well the robbing so and so can keep my miles, I’m now going with British Airways
Always tend to find with Virgin that if you ask them nicely enough they’re pretty reasonable with such things
I’m finding some of the comments on this thread, whilst correct, are not very sympathetic to the OP. Hopefully asking them nicely as @Pongiswaring suggests, might have a kind soul in VS take pity on them.
I can understand how this happened to someone who’s not spent time on clever forums like HfP, and has taken the usual comms around earning of miles at face value. It sounds like there wasn’t really prominent info about expiry, and anytime the OP looked in the past 5 years he would have seen that miles don’t expire anyway. So there was a narrow window long ago and not really enough attention drawn.
Aditionally in the awful events of 2020 I really don’t think the OP could gave given it much attention or taken any useful action or travelled if that was what it took to keep miles alive. Virgin staff would also have been very hard to contact.
In full disclosure I will say British Airways also stole 100,000 hard-earned miles off me in the same way. No personalised communication about what lost them snd I was far too busy doing other things elsewhere to have picked up any generic comms as I simply wasn’t around. Even though they had my address and email no comms was ever sent.
I really hope the OP gets his miles back and hope he sticks around to pick up what experts will say over tume on here about good ways to use them.
If my memory serves me correctly prior to the points having no expiry all you had to do to keep it active was to do a transaction. I can remember that simply using the virgin atlantic credit card to earn miles/points was enough. To say you have been robbed of your points is a bit unfair. The rules are clearly there to be read – back then it would have stated what you need to do to keep the account active.Unfortunate and what I would suggest is you phone Virgin Atlantic and explain what has happened and ask if there is anything that can be done bearing in mind they no longer have an expiry date. A friendly approach mentioning your age and reason for trip and you never know!
@LadyLondon
I agree with some of what you say but what was the OP doing in the 4 years since 2020?
And I would say BA didn’t steal your 100,000 points. It is totally the wrong word.
As you know they don’t expire until 3 years after the last activity so if you discount 2020 you still had 2018 and 2019 to generate some sort of activity.
What were they doing? Their life, I expect.
However I can tell you that the impact of things just stopping during covid really didn’t begin to lift for me until early 2024 and in some ways still ongoing. Catching up on things is hard particularly things that have to be fought for or things where there might be conflict.Yup I’d also use the word steal for what hapoened to my points. I kmow you’re well up on current rules and correctly, but the unfair stealing of my hard earned miles pre-dates those rules ny quite a margin. In fact no such rules had been announced and then suddenly new rules that were not communicated and bye bye my 100,000 miles.
In today’s world of dynamic pricing and the dearth of Barbados availability on Virgin those 180k miles probably would have not been enough anyways.
I have never had any miles expire on me as I know the rules and would have ensured I did whats necessary to keep them alive however I have some sympathy with the OP.
Congratulations on your up and coming milestone. Time served.
It’s true I hadn’t looked at my air miles, I knew they were there, until I went to use them, I spoke to virgin who said, we changed the ruling in 2020, any points you had before that date have expired, sorry. I asked if there was a way of getting them back and she said unfortunately not, all so I am not a troll, this genuinely happened, sorry if that upsets some of you
It also amazes me, people talk about my loyalty, to virgin, I actually haven’t flown with them for ten years, due to many reasons, aren’t you the lucky one’s, not to have suffered any loss!
They didn’t steal your points and we are not the ‘lucky’ ones. Everyone makes mistakes and unfortunately you have no one to blame other than yourself. Most people on here will have some kind ofcdxprnsive travel mistake at dome point. All you can do is learn the lesson and move on. There’s no point dwelling on it, it’s done with.
It also amazes me, people talk about my loyalty, to virgin, I actually haven’t flown with them for ten years, due to many reasons, aren’t you the lucky one’s, not to have suffered any loss!
If you haven’t flown with Virgin for ten years (2015), and not earned any points via any other route, then what you had would actually have expired back in 2018 not 2020. The latter is when the non-expiry rule came in, not when everything before that suddenly expired. As noted previously if there had been any activity on your account since 2017, the points would not have expired before the (potentially beneficial) 2020 rule change.
If you haven’t looked at your account in seven years and didn’t understand the rules at the time then that’s unfortunate, but points expiring in accordance with the terms and conditions is clearly not stealing.
It also amazes me, people talk about my loyalty, to virgin, I actually haven’t flown with them for ten years, due to many reasons, aren’t you the lucky one’s, not to have suffered any loss!
If you’re not flown with Virgin for 10 years then you’ve not demonstrated any loyalty to VS.
Loyalty schemes get customers loyalty to a company. The company has no loyalty to the customers.
Since your last flight was apparently in 2015 then, absent another qualifying activity, your points would have actually been removed in 2018 – approx 2 years before VS changed the non expiry rule.
Your case is a reminder that airline / hotel / supermarket points do have a value and should be looked after as though they are cash – with regular checking or balances and so on.
If you had spotted this in 2018 and contacted VS then the result might have been different.
What were they doing? Their life, I expect.
However I can tell you that the impact of things just stopping during covid really didn’t begin to lift for me until early 2024 and in some ways still ongoing. Catching up on things is hard particularly things that have to be fought for or things where there might be conflict.Yup I’d also use the word steal for what hapoened to my points. I kmow you’re well up on current rules and correctly, but the unfair stealing of my hard earned miles pre-dates those rules ny quite a margin. In fact no such rules had been announced and then suddenly new rules that were not communicated and bye bye my 100,000 miles.
This post is about a Virgin not BA.
BA has had a 3 year expiry rule for a very, very long time.
“This post is about a Virgin not BA.”
Not really sure why you’re coming back on this. It was a comparable experience to the OP’s with Virgin, that happened to me with BA.
“BA has had a 3 year expiry rule for a very, very long time.” …And I’m well aware of how long ago my miles were lost by new rules brought in that weren’t personally communicated, when they had all the information they needed to do this.
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