Can I Convert Virgin Points To Avios?

If you have taken the odd Virgin flight but mainly fly with BA you might be wondering if you can convert Virgin Points to Avios, particularly if you feel you’ll never earn enough Virgin Points to redeem for a flight! Whilst Virgin & BA are technically rivals there is an indirect way you can convert Virgin Points to Avios BUT the exchange rate is very poor. Read on to find out more!

How do I convert Virgin Points To Avios?

You will need at least 10,000 Virgin Points, an IHG account & of course a BA account. If you haven’t already got an IHG account you can sign up for one here – https://www.ihg.com/

1. Call the Flying Club Helpline with your IHG® Rewards account number to exchange your Virgin Points. You need at least 10,000 Virgin Points and can do so in increments of 5,000. The exchange rate is 1:1. So 10,000 Virgin Points would equal 10,000 IHG points.
2. Once the points appear in your IHG account you can then transfer them to Avios. The exchange rate here is 5:1 which means 10,000 IG points would transfer into 2,000 Avios.

Is it worth it?

As you can see above the rate is rather abysmal with 10,000 Virgin Points converting into only 2,000 Avios. We value both Virgin Points & Avios at 1p which means you’d be losing £80 worth of value taking this route. Here are some better options…

1. Transfer to IHG/Hilton. 10,000 Virgin Points would get you 10,000 IHG points or 15,000 Hilton points. Enough to get at least one night in a wide range of hotels.
2. Use your points on a Virgin Red redemption. Through Virgin Red you can redeem your points for things such as Greggs sausage rolls (200 points), Vue cinema tickets (1,600 points) or Harrods cream tea for 2 (6,250 points.) Download the Virgin Red app to see all your options!
3. Redeem for a Eurostar voucher. 12,500 points = £50 Eurostar e-vouchers

Don’t forget with Virgin’s partnership with KLM/Air France there are now also a range of cheaper short-haul options you can redeem your Virgin Points for. See them here – https://pointsuncovered.com/virgin-atlantic/where-can-i-fly-to-for-15000-virgin-points/

Conclusion

As you can see whilst you can convert Virgin Points to Avios there is no reasonable reason why you would with the extremely poor transfer rate. You are much better off using your Virgin Points for one of the many other things we mentioned above. What have you used your Virgin Points for?