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Virgin Flying Club’s online shopping portal, Virgin ‘Shops Away’, is offering boosted earnings at a wide range of popular retailers and travel businesses.
The earning rates (and bonuses) vary depending on the retailer, but some such as Evans Cycles, are offering as much as 4x the standard rate:
From a travel perspective, 6 Virgin Miles per £1 spent at Booking dotcom is pretty good. For comparison, cashback rates at TopCashback and Quidco are just 3-4% at time of writing.
That said, you can pick up 8 Avios per £1 over at the Avios estore, so it always pays to shop around.
Don’t forget that you can still earn Virgin Miles through ‘Shops Away’ when shopping in-store at Waitrose. That’s nowhere near as good as it used to be, but still worth knowing about if you’re a frequent Waitrose shopper.
Conclusion
Always remember to quickly check what the cashback sites and the BA/Avios shopping portals etc are offering too, as there might be other promos that offer better value for some retailers, despite Virgin offering boosted rates.
Virgin Shops Away has a track record of deducting miles from your account months if not years later. Especially for travel bookings. I now avoid them and 2 miles per £1 at Wickes won’t change that!
Exactly! Dodgiest shopping portal ever, I wouldn’t use it if they were offering 100x miles. Not only do they claw back the miles without explanation over a year later, the amounts awarded and clawed back can vary, making it impossible to track which is which. And they then claim the transaction was cancelled when it wasn’t
Avoid like the plague
If you get your caffeine fix from Caffe Nero and pay using a Mastercard or American Express card you’ll now be able to earn Virgin Atlantic Flying Club miles. You’ll earn 8 miles for every £1 you spend.
I shop at waitrose at least once a week, more often than not several times per week. So far this year in 11 months, 8 transactions have tracked. It would be nice if it actually worked.