�鶹ֱ��

The contenders, in one breath

There are three cards in this fight:

‍Virgin Atlantic Reward Credit Card — the free one from Virgin Money. Earns Virgin Points, no annual fee, designed for casual Virgin Atlantic flyers.

‍Virgin Atlantic Reward+ Credit Card — the £160-a-year version with a bigger welcome bonus, double the earn rate, and a lower spend threshold to unlock the annual reward voucher.

�鶹ֱ�� Full Credit Card — our £15-a-month membership card with 5x points on everything, worldwide travel insurance, no FX fees, and points you can use on any flight with any airline. We've also tucked in our Free Credit Card for completeness, because it's the natural "no annual fee" alternative to the Virgin Atlantic Reward card.

Virgin Points (the Virgin Atlantic cards)

Virgin Points are the rewards currency of Virgin Atlantic Flying Club and Virgin Red. To earn them on a Reward card, you have to join Flying Club and link your number in the Virgin Money app.

- Reward card earns 0.75 Virgin Points per £1 on everyday spend, 1.5 per £1 direct with Virgin Atlantic or Virgin Holidays.

- Reward+ card earns 1.5 Virgin Points per £1 on everyday spend, 3 per £1 direct with Virgin Atlantic or Virgin Holidays.

Both cards cap monthly points-earning at your credit limit (welcome and bonus points don't count toward the cap).

Where can you spend Virgin Points? On Virgin Atlantic flights and upgrades, on SkyTeam partner airlines (Delta, Air France, KLM, Korean Air, Aeroméxico, China Airlines and the rest of the SkyTeam family — Virgin Atlantic became SkyTeam's first and only UK member when it officially joined on 2 March 2023), on a smaller list of non-alliance partners like ANA and Air New Zealand, plus Virgin Red rewards (hotels, spa days, the occasional pair of Lion King tickets).

Honest take: Virgin Points are genuinely one of the most useful UK airline currencies, particularly for transatlantic flights and partner redemptions like ANA business class. But they're an airline currency. They're great if you want to fly Virgin Atlantic or its alliance partners. They're useless on Ryanair, easyJet, British Airways, Emirates or Qatar.

�鶹ֱ�� points (Full Credit Card)

We give you 5 points per £1 on everything with the Full Credit Card. Spend at one of our hand-picked Experiences (restaurants, fitness studios, theatre, getaways) and that climbs to up to 25 points per £1.

Then you can spend those points on:

Any flight, with any airline, booked direct. British Airways, easyJet, Ryanair, Qatar, Emirates, Vueling, Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, Virgin Atlantic — yes, even Virgin Atlantic. As long as you book direct with the airline, the points work.

Hotels, airport lounges, eSIMs (in-app).

Any flight, with any airline, booked direct. British Airways, easyJet, Ryanair, Qatar, Emirates, Vueling, Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, Virgin Atlantic — yes, even Virgin Atlantic. As long as you book direct with the airline, the points work.

Asia Miles with Cathay Pacific at a 5:1 conversion if you want to top up a frequent flyer balance.

You can also send points to friends in-app, which Virgin Money can't quite match.

Sign-up and welcome points bonuses

As of May 2026, the standard welcome offers have just reset following Virgin Money's boosted April–May campaign:

Reward+: 18,000 Virgin Points on your first purchase in 90 days. No minimum spend. (A boosted 36,000-point offer ran until 18 May 2026 — if you applied during that window, lucky you.)

Reward: 3,000 Virgin Points on your first purchase in 90 days.

�鶹ֱ�� Full: 10,000 �鶹ֱ�� points when you spend £1,000 in your first 30 days, paid in tranches (£200 = 2,000 pts; £500 = 3,000 pts; £1,000 = 5,000 pts).

Virgin's welcome bonus on Reward+ is genuinely strong. At a generous valuation of 1p per Virgin Point, those 18,000 points could nudge towards an economy redemption to New York. We're not going to pretend otherwise. Just remember it's a one-shot promo currency; what matters more long-term is the earn rate on your everyday spend.

Using points to book flights

Where Virgin genuinely wins: that annual reward voucher. Spend £10,000 on the Reward+ in a card year (£20,000 on the free Reward card) and you unlock a Flying Club reward voucher worth up to 150,000 Virgin Points depending on your tier. You can use it for a companion ticket on a reward flight, a cabin upgrade, or, if you're Silver or Gold in Flying Club, a Clubhouse pass. If you and your partner are flying Upper Class to JFK anyway, this voucher can be properly valuable. We're not too proud to admit it.

Where �鶹ֱ�� wins: flexibility. If your idea of a good holiday is a £39 Ryanair flight to Pisa, or that £240 easyJet flight to Palma for your mate’s Hen Do, then Virgin Points can't help you. �鶹ֱ�� points can.

Overseas spending

Here's where it gets a little uncomfortable for Virgin Money. Per their published summary boxes (VM48924 and VM48925):

"Non-Sterling Transaction Fee (for foreign currency transactions): 2.99% of transaction. We will not charge this if the transaction is in Euros, Swedish Kronor or Romanian Lei and it takes place in the UK or European Economic Area (EEA)."

Translated: free in the Eurozone (and Sweden and Romania), 2.99% everywhere else. Going to New York, Tokyo, Bangkok, Bali, Istanbul, Dubai, Marrakech? You're paying 2.99% on every tap.

�鶹ֱ��, by contrast, charges 0% FX fees, anywhere in the world, in any currency. We pass on the Mastercard exchange rate without a mark-up. We've even built a calculator on yonder.com/spending-abroad so you can sanity-check the rate against the ECB benchmark for yourself.

For a card that exists to reward you for booking long-haul travel, the Virgin cards' 2.99% FX fee on non-EEA spending is, to put it gently, a strange omission. If you fly Virgin Atlantic to the US three times a year and put $4,000 of meals and Ubers on the card while you're there, that's roughly £90 a year you've handed to Virgin Money for the privilege.

Cash withdrawals abroad

- Virgin Atlantic Reward / Reward+: 5% handling fee on cash advances plus interest from the day of the transaction (no interest-free period for cash) at the 25.70% monthly cash advance rate. Don't.

- �鶹ֱ�� Full: £150/day fee-free withdrawals on your credit line, subject to your credit limit, 3 transactions per day. Still treated as a cash advance for interest purposes, but no fee on top.

Travel insurance

This one's not close.

Virgin Atlantic Reward / Reward+: No travel insurance included on the card. (Virgin Money sells travel insurance separately as an unrelated product.)

�鶹ֱ�� Full Credit Card cardholders, however, are covered for almost any crisis. Powered by Lloyds, �鶹ֱ��’s worldwide family travel insurance is worth up to £275 a year, including winter sports and car excess cover anywhere in the world.

The catch: cover applies when you book your travel with your �鶹ֱ�� card, with the usual eligibility, exclusions and a 60-day max trip length. If you'd otherwise pay £100–£300 a year for a decent family annual travel policy, that's a chunky chunk of the Full Credit Card's £180-a-year fee handled in one feature.

Global acceptance

Both Virgin Atlantic cards and �鶹ֱ�� are Mastercards, so they share the same global acceptance footprint — Mastercard is accepted at over 110 million merchant locations worldwide, across 210+ countries and territories. No advantage either way here.

Dining & lifestyle rewards

A few examples from the current and recent catalogue: StayÖÖD, Freddie’s Flowers, Kricket, Healf, BAO, Unplugged, Frive, Ancient + Brave, Wahaca – to name but a few. The list goes on, including �鶹ֱ�� Tickets and �鶹ֱ�� Hotels.

Virgin Red (the consumer rewards arm tied to the Virgin Atlantic cards) has experiences too, like concerts, spa days, the occasional Virgin Voyages cruise but the catalogue is narrower and the standout perks are largely Virgin-branded.