My review of the Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse lounge at London Heathrow Terminal 3 (part 2)

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This is part two of my review of the Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse lounge in Heathrow Terminal 3. Part 1 of my Virgin Clubhouse review can be found here.

EDIT: You can read a more recent review of the Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse lounge at Heathrow Terminal 3 here.

There are four other corners of the Clubhouse lounge that I didn’t cover in part 1. This is the library which is meant to be a quiet area:

This is the nearest Virgin gets to a business centre – a handful of laptops in the middle of the room:

To the left hand side of the lounge is a flight of stairs. Go up and you find yourself in a secluded seating area. I sat here for 20 minutes doing the interview with the Daily Express which appeared recently.

Take another flight of stairs and you find yourself somewhere very unexpected – a roof terrace!

Due to the joys of the Summer 2016 weather it wasn’t somewhere that anyone was choosing to linger but I can imagine it is a pleasant spot to use on a sunny day.

The restaurant

Finally, I want to talk about the restaurant. This is an open plan area in the lounge, although the layout means that you don’t have people walking past you all the time. Service was attentive but casual in a typical Virgin style.

The food was excellent. I was genuinely surprised. My meal was up there on a par with the Qatar Airways restaurant in their Terminal 4 lounge.

On the day I was there it was offering as starters:

Cauliflower soup with truffle oil

Confit Asian duck bao bun (see below) with spring onion, cucumber and hoisin sauce

Potted salmon with tartar salad on toasted sourdough

For main courses you could pick from:

Sweet and sour chicken (see below) with jasmine rice and prawn cracker

Pan fried rainbow trout, warm Jersey Royal potato salad and toasted sourdough

The Clubhouse cheese burger with beef tomato, American cheese, red onion, lettuce, gherkin, cocktail sauce and chips (there is also a vegetarian burger option)

Three salads were also on offer.

Finally, for dessert, they had:

Warm doughnut, strawberry jam and clotted ice cream (see below)

Home made gin and tonic and elderflower sorbet with fresh lime

plus fruit salad and ice cream.

There honestly wasn’t a duff note anywhere. If you heading to the Virgin Clubhouse at Heathrow, make sure you leave time and stomach space for a full meal.

I haven’t mentioned the bar in this review but, trust me, there is one, it is very long and it seems to stock pretty much anything you could possibly want!

Back in 1997, I remember the lounge having a sound proof room with some very expensive hi-fi equipment in it. You could put on a CD, crank up the volume and take a seat in a comfy armchair. That seems to have gone which is a shame.

Conclusion

You can, in general, believe the hype about the Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse at Heathrow. Excellent food, a great bar, lots of space, the novel roof terrace, a free haircut and a sauna and jacuzzi (and a table tennis table) – you need to be pretty churlish not to find fun in that lot.

It could be better, of course. A few bottles of Krug or Dom Perignon, a better kids playroom, a broader magazine selection, a full buffet for people who don’t have the time or inclination to sit in the restaurant ….. you can always add something else.

Making more of the spa treatments free would also be good, although to be fair Etihad has just gone down the same route and started charging for most of the treatments in its Heathrow lounge. British Airways still has free ‘mini’ treatments but they are nowhere near as comprehensive as what Virgin offers.

The Virgin Heathrow Clubhouse should definitely be on your airline bucket list. In a few days I’ll tell you whether I believe that the Upper Class in-flight product should be on your list too ….

You can find out more about the Clubhouse on the Virgin Atlantic website here.

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: