How to redeem your Virgin Atlantic Credit Card Upgrade voucher

Virgin Atlantic Reward+ Credit Card is probably the best non-Amex traveller card in the UK, and the Tier Reward after hitting £10,000 annual spend is quite attractive. One of the rewards to choose from is an upgrade voucher, and I’ll talk about how to use it today.

[Receiving the Voucher]

First of all, you should receive the voucher within 30 days of spending the qualifying amount. You won’t receive an email or see it in your Virgin Atlantic account, but you’ll see the following row in the activity statement:

You don’t need to specifically choose from the three Tier Rewards, instead whenever you are ready you can just redeem straightaway.

[Facts]

The voucher can be used on both revenue and reward tickets. This is a big advantage over the BA upgrade voucher issued by Barclaycard.

Only Virgin Atlantic operated flights are upgradable. Economy Light tickets are non-upgradable.

The voucher can be used to upgrade a return flight or two one-way flights. You can use half of the voucher on a one-way flight and save the other half for the future.

You can upgrade one-cabin, i.e. Economy to Premium or Premium to Upper Class.

Reward availability is required in the upgraded cabin.

You need to pay the difference in taxes and charges.

The voucher cannot be redeemed online. You must call the contact centre to redeem it.

It can be applied on tickets issued by travel agencies too – you don’t have to book directly from Virgin Atlantic, which is good as they don’t have best rate guarantee.

You can redeem the voucher for someone else – you don’t have to travel.

[Calculating the charges]

To know how much you need to pay for the upgrade is easy. Say that you want to upgrade a one-way flight from London to Miami, then just search any date for that route on Virgin’s website. Select a flight and cabin then you’ll see ticket price on the next page:

See Taxes, fees and charges? It’s not the whole picture though, you must click the link to view the actual breakdown, which will show you the carrier-imposed surcharge too:

The two numbers combined are payable charges for a reward ticket. And in this case:

  • Economy: £120 + £169 = £289
  • Premium: £120 + £270 = £390
  • Upper Class: £350 + 270 = £620

Which means you must pay £101 for upgrading from Economy to Premium, or £230 from Premium to Upper Class.

[Using the Voucher]

The first thing you need to ensure is reward availability in the cabin you want to upgrade to. Since Virgin Atlantic doesn’t guarantee reward seats on any flight, you may need to search their website often or subscribe to one of the alerting services.

Once you find it:

  • For reward ticket, you don’t need an existing booking, simply call in to make the booking with points and voucher
  • For revenue ticket, you don’t need any Virgin points, just call in to upgrade with the voucher

Since fuel surcharges are sky high at the moment, upgrading a revenue ticket usually turns out a much better deal.

Virgin Atlantic actually has a Gold service line which isn’t publicised on their website. However if you are a Gold member you should be able to find the 0800 number in any newsletter they sent you. I wasn’t aware and just called the regular number at 7pm on Wednesday. It took 25 minutes to get through, which wasn’t too bad.

The agent could see reward availability and my upgrade voucher no problem. She asked for my credit card details to pay the £230 charge, which is identical to my calculations above.

It’d be nice to be able to redeem the voucher online, but overall the contact centre experience was smooth and positive, and I think paying £230 for an upgrade to Upper Class, plus finally finding a use for that voucher feels really good!

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