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Virgin Atlantic Flying Club has returned with another bonus offer for buying miles at a discount. The promotion will run until 30 November, 2018.

The are two separate elements to the promotion, with bonuses ranging from 10-40%.

Miles Booster

The more interesting element is called “Miles Booster”. Miles Booster allows you to buy miles for 1p a mile, but the number of miles you can buy is based on the actual number of miles flown on a Virgin Atlantic flight (paid or reward). You are able to retro-actively “miles boost” for any Virgin Atlantic flights you’ve taken within the last six months. You can also “miles boost” for any future flights you will be taking with Virgin Atlantic. (the miles won’t arrive until after your flight, however)

With Miles Booster – and the 30% bonus available during November – your net cost would end up as 0.77p per mile.  I suspect that many readers would jump on that price for Avios, but are more cautious with Virgin Atlantic, given the limited number of high-value redemption opportunities.

Buy Miles

If you don’t have a Virgin Atlantic flight to “miles boost”, you might be interested in simply buying miles. The bonus is tiered however.

• 15% bonus when you buy 1,000 – 9,000 miles
• 20% bonus when you buy 10,000 – 29,000 miles
• 30% bonus when you buy 30,000 – 69,000 miles
• 40% bonus when you buy 70,000 – 100,000 miles

Miles normally cost 1.5p each (plus a £15 service charge), so buying 70,000 miles (pre-bonus) would cost you £1,065 and you’d ultimately receive 98,000 miles.  This results in a per-mile price of 1.09p.

That price is higher than what I would recommend for a speculative purchase of Virgin miles, and it is also frustrating that the smaller top-up amounts don’t receive as high of a bonus. But there are potential uses, as I will highlight in a future post.

You can reach the landing page for this promotion by clicking here.