Earn 700 Virgin Flying Club miles for £3

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Reader Rich dropped me a line with details of an interesting Virgin Atlantic offer via their Shops Away online shopping mall.

Online hotel booking site booking.com is currently offering 700 Virgin Flying Club miles for any hotel booking made their site if you click through from Shops Away.

Anyone who collects Flying Club miles should be able to get £7+ of value out of 700 miles. This means that it is a pretty good return on booking, say, a £100 hotel room.

It is, of course, an even better deal if you book a £3 hotel room.

The strength of booking.com is that, unlike Expedia, it has a lot of relationships with hotels at the bottom end of the value chain. If you search for a city in, say, India and rank the hotels by price, you should find something at £3.

The bed and breakfast pictured above, which I won’t name because it is unfair to focus lots of ‘dead’ bookings at the same property, is only £3 for example.

I have made a £3 booking in India and I will report back when I get my miles. The transaction is showing as ‘Pending’ with 700 miles due. Rich has already received his so it does seem to work OK.

The link to the Shops Away online mall on the Virgin Atlantic website is here. You need to search for booking.com once you have clicked through and logged in.

PS. Some readers have shared their concerns, in the comments below, that this is not necessarily in the best interests of the hotel involved. You need to decide – are you are helping the B&B by booking a room which would otherwise remain empty? Or are you hurting the B&B by depriving them of selling the room to someone else who would actually turn up and spend additional money of food, tours etc (but would then want a breakfast and their room cleaning)? I am personally OK with this one or I would not have run it but you should make your own decision.

How to earn Virgin Points from UK credit cards (December 2021)

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, one has a bonus of 15,000 points):

Virgin Atlantic Reward Mastercard

The UK’s most generous free Visa or Mastercard at 0.75 points / £1 Read our full review

Virgin Atlantic Reward+ Mastercard

15,000 points bonus and the most generous non-Amex for day to day spending 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: