Virgin Atlantic: New Sweet Spots to Europe and Africa (from 6,000 points!)

On October 31, 2024, Virgin Atlantic officially switched its award pricing model over to dynamic pricing.

Virgin Atlantic is notorious for having hefty surcharges on award tickets, but what’s interesting is that they are also extending dynamic pricing to their surcharges, to some extent.

We’re seeing pricing as low as 6,000 points each way on some routes plus about $75 in taxes and fees — like JFK to London. Even flights that connect through London to other destinations that Virgin serves are seeing some low pricing on some dates — like JFK to Johannesburg, South Africa for just 13,500 one way + $180ish or from Seattle to Johannesburg for 16,500 points. Some “Upper Class” (business class) flights from JFK to London are as low as 29,000 points one way!

Fees still remain much higher on the return flights to the US.

And since pricing is dynamic that means that while some dates will have low prices, others will see higher rates.

Here’s an overview of how to find the best routes and the cheapest prices so you can decide if redeeming your points this way makes sense for you!

Virgin Atlantic Routing Options

Most Virgin Atlantic routes operate to and from London Heathrow. That’s one reason a lot of the flights have high fees — leaving London you have to pay the Air Passenger Duty, which can be $100 or more (depending on the length of flight and class you’re flying in).

You can see all the routes at flightconnections.com

In the United States, you can depart from:

• Seattle
• San Francisco
• LAX
• Las Vegas
• Boston
• New York JFK
• Washington DC (IAD)
• Atlanta
• Orlando
• Miami
• Tampa

Flights from the US go mostly to London (Heathrow) and a few go to Manchester. One route — Orlando to Edinburgh — also goes to Scotland.

From London, you can connect to other airports — including three African countries (Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa), Middle Eastern cities (Tel Aviv, Riyadh, and Dubai), the Maldives, and India (Mumbai, Bengaluru, New Delhi).

Again, pricing is variable which means that booking these routes with Virgin Atlantic points won’t always be a good deal. But when points prices and taxes are lower, it will!

Tip: Pair this with another option for return flights

As of writing this, the cheapest flights with points and taxes seem to be those departing the US. Return flights to the US have fees at least 2x as much and often the points prices are higher, too.

You might find that you stretch your points the furthest by using Virgin Atlantic points to book your flight from the US to Europe, or Africa, or India — and using a different points currency to come home.

We have full guides to most major regions in the world.

Tools to Find the Cheapest Tickets

To find the cheapest tickets, there are a few different tools to use. I’ll explain each of them below and explain their pros and cons. You will likely need to use more than one of these tools to find all of the options

Virgin Atlantic Website: Flexible Date Calendar

Virgin Atlantic has two options for viewing pricing over the course of a month.

One is the Reward Seat Checker.

Now, before we go any further I want to mention that although Virgin has switched to dynamic pricing they do still have an award chart. The award chart only applies to flights where “Saver” seats are available. And even though there’s a chart, pricing is still variable. But there’s a cap for how many points it will cost for a Saver fare.

This chart from the Virgin Atlantic website shows the starting Saver award price for some of their most popular routes.

 

The reward seat checker is a good way to see what dates Saver rates are available. Any date with the little red tag has Saver rates available for the cabin class where the tag appears. As you can see, the Saver rates are not always the same price, but for this particular route (JFK to LHR) the range for a Saver award in economy is 6,000-20,000 points.

While the Reward Seat Checker does show you a month at a time, it doesn’t show the taxes so I don’t find it as useful now that taxes and fees are also variable.

Instead, I think a more useful took is the flexible date calendar. This used to be easy to access but now takes a few extra clicks to get there.

First, head to virginatlantic.com to start your search. You do NOT want to click “Reward Flights.” Instead click the drop down arrow under “Journey” select “Multi-city”

You’ll be redirected to a different interface for flight searches. Now you’ll select the route you want to search. I suggest searching for one way at a time. Then make sure “Flexible dates” is selected as well as “Points” under “Show Price In”

The view will default to a 7 day flexible calendar. Then just click “Price Calendar” near the top of the page and you should see a 30 day calendar instead.

If for some reason, the “Price Calendar” option doesn’t show. You can change the URL to force it to show.

In the URL find the word “dates” and change to “calendar”

Now you’ll see a full month at a time! You can see here what a difference a day can make. On February 16, this is showing a ticket for 6,000 points + $74 — one day later on February 17th, it’s 10,000 points and fees have nearly tripled to $218!

My Take: Overall, this is going to be the most accurate tool. I love being able to see a full month at a time. And it’s free!

My small frustration with it is that it can’t seem to populate the destination city easily if you’re going anywhere but London.

When I search for connecting flights — like from Seattle to Johannesburg, even if I put in the airport code JNB, it doesn’t recognize it. Instead, I have to search for the country – South Africa – and then for the city.

It’s just going to take a few more moments for that search.

It’s main limitation is going to be that it can only search one city at a time. So if you are flexible about departure or destination city, you’ll need to run multiple searches.

PointsYeah.com

PointsYeah is an award search tool with a lot of free functionality. It’s usually quite fast and user friendly.

But currently, I could not easily get it to pull up the Virgin Atlantic deals I was easily finding on the Virgin Atlantic site. I wanted to leave this on here because it’s a tool I use for other purposes and maybe we will see an improvement. But for now, I’d skip using this one when you’re searching for Virgin Atlantic flights.

Seats.Aero

For quick searches for multiple cities, Seats.aero provides the best functionality.

On the free version, you can search 60 days out and for a week at a time when you can access cached searches. You can then filter them by cheapest to most expensive. But what’s especially nice if you have some flexibility, you can enter multiple airports at a time to search all routes.

Seats.aero won’t let you filter by taxes but if you hover over a price, it will show the taxes and fees for that ticket.

Not all routes are available for searching if you have the free seats.aero version. On the free version, you’ll find that less common searches aren’t available, like this from LAX to JNB.

But with the paid Pro version (which I subscribe to), you’ll have more functionality. It costs $9.99 per month. Keep in mind that you can just have the Pro membership for months you are actively searching for flights and then cancel when you’re not doing trip planning.

In this case, I could search for routes to Johannesburg from both LAX and Las Vegas and instantly filter to “VS” which is the code for Virgin Atlantic.

Seats.aero does have an “Explore” option where you can view all the recent searches between regions for a certain airline. But I found that this would leave off a lot of options.
Here’s the search, for instance, from North America to Africa on Virgin Atlantic — it doesn’t include any of the South Africa flights I had found by manually searching a few minutes before.

My Take: If you have some flexibility in your departure or destination cities, this is going to save you time over searching every route possibility on Virgin Atlantic’s own website. Just be aware that the Explore feature won’t show all routes and isn’t particularly accurate.

For the most up to date options, you’ll want to upgrade to the Pro version.

I think the paid Pro version is worth it for months that you are doing some more award flight searches. But most people won’t find it necessary to keep year round. You do get a new hotel search feature with it that also includes hotel alerts! And you can also use the Pro version to set flight alerts.

I generally prefer looking at availability on a calendar rather than a list, and I wish I could see taxes without hovering. But overall, this is a great option for searching. Note that some searches are cached so might be a few hours old, meaning for especially rare availability, it may be gone by the time you’ve found it.

How to Get Virgin Atlantic Miles

Virgin Atlantic Flying Club miles are fairly easy to come by since all the major banks transfer to them.

Most major banks transfer to Virgin which makes it easy to get the points you need.

These are the programs that transfer to Virgin:

• American Express Membership Rewards 1:1
• Capital One 1:1 (transfers to Virgin Red, from there you can move points to Virgin Atlantic)
• Chase Ultimate Rewards Points 1:1
• Citi ThankYou Points 1:1
• Marriott Bonvoy 3:1 with a 5,000 bonus for every 60,000 points transferred

Note: While most of these programs transfer at a 1:1 ratio, Marriott Bonvoy points transfer at a 3:1 ratio. This means that for every 3,000 Marriott points you transfer, you’ll only get 1,000 Virgin points.

It’s usually not a good idea to use Marriott points this way because you can lose a lot of value. But, if you’re short by a few thousand points and you have a lot of Marriot points, it may make sense for you.

How to Get More Points

The easiest way to earn a lot of points quickly is to sign up for a new credit card with a welcome offer.

Visit the best offers page to see the top card offers that are currently available.

Bonus Tip: Sometimes the banks offer transfer bonuses where you can get even more points. We’ve seen fairly regular 30%-40% bonuses which makes these sweet spots even sweeter!

Points Pooling

Virgin does offer points pooling in a household, but with a lot of restrictions. Read more here.

 

Cancellation and Change Fees

If your flight begins or ends in the US, you’ll have 24 hours to cancel for free.

After that, the cost to change or cancel an award ticket with Virgin Atlantic will be $100 for flights departing the U.S. and 70 GBP for flights leaving the U.K.