Virgin Atlantic extends Virgin Flying Club status and vouchers – for the fifth time

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Virgin Atlantic has announced a further set of status extensions for Flying Club members.

If you have Gold or Silver status with Virgin, you will see an additional SIX months of status has been applied to your account.

(If you don’t see it yet, give it 24 hours. Do not call Virgin Atlantic.)

This is the fifth extension that members have received to date, and means that members who held status in March 2020 will have seen a total extension of 24 months.

All outstanding Clubhouse, upgrade and 2-4-1 vouchers have also been extended by a further six months.

It’s not clear if Virgin Atlantic sees this as a final extension or not. Even if long-haul travel to the USA opens up in the next few months, both Virgin Atlantic and British Airways face a more fundamental problem.

Current status programmes are based on generating a certain number of members at each tier in order to control benefits such as lounge access.

Unless there are medium term changes to how the loyalty programmes operate – such as permanent cuts in tier point requirements – the airlines will soon start to haemorrhage status members as they fail to requalify. BA’s 25% cut in tier point requirements is unlikely to be enough to keep the tier numbers where they should be, and alienating current status members will be the last thing that anyone wants to do.

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: