The Virgin Atlantic Reward+ is Virgin Money's paid-tier co-brand card, sitting above the fee-free Virgin Atlantic Reward card in the same stable. You'll earn 1.5 Virgin Points per £1 on everyday spend, rising to a bonus rate when you pay directly for Virgin Atlantic flights or Virgin Atlantic Holidays — a straightforward structure with none of the category juggling you get on some cashback cards. New applicants can currently pick up a welcome bonus of Virgin Points on signup, sometimes split across an initial purchase and a minimum-spend hurdle in the first few months — these promotional bonuses move around a fair amount through the year, so treat whatever number is advertised at the point of application as the one that counts, not anything you read here or elsewhere last month.
The card's real hook is the annual companion or upgrade voucher, earned once you clear £10,000 of spend in a card year. It's a genuinely different mechanic to the British Airways Amex approach: instead of a flat voucher, Virgin scales the redemption value to your Flying Club tier. Red (i.e. no status) members get a voucher worth up to 75,000 Virgin Points towards a companion seat or upgrade; Silver and Gold members get double that, up to 150,000 points. That's a clever way to reward existing loyal flyers, but it also means the card is a much better deal if you've already got status than if you're starting from zero — a Red-tier voucher won't stretch nearly as far on a premium long-haul redemption. For comparison, BA's Amex Premium Plus card asks for £15,000 spend for its companion voucher, so Virgin's threshold is lower, though the value-scaling-by-tier structure makes a like-for-like comparison messy.
Where this card has quietly got worse is lounge access. Virgin Money used to let Gold and Silver Flying Club members redeem a Clubhouse pass through the Reward and Reward+ cards; that perk has been withdrawn. If you're weighing this card up partly for lounge access, don't — you'll need status earned through flying, or a different card entirely, to get into a Virgin Clubhouse now. What you do still get: no foreign exchange fees on Eurozone spending (plus a couple of smaller currencies), Mastercard acceptance that's noticeably wider than Amex-based rivals, and Tier Point earning towards Flying Club status on your spending, capped monthly. None of that is groundbreaking, but it's honest, functional card mechanics rather than headline-grabbing extras.
The annual fee sits in the mid-hundreds-of-pounds range — not nominal, and worth weighing against the fee-free Virgin Atlantic Reward card, which offers a similar voucher at a higher spend threshold for £0 a year. If you're not going to clear £10,000 of spend on this card within a year, the Reward+ fee is dead weight; the sums only work if you're either a heavy spender, already flying Virgin with some regularity, or both. The representative APR is steep, as it is on virtually every UK rewards card, so this only makes sense if you clear the balance monthly and are earning points, not carrying debt and paying interest that will wipe out any voucher value many times over.
