There will certainly be more offers to come from Virgin leading up to Black Friday, but the first wave has already been launched. Here’s what you need to know:
In this post:
Triple Virgin Points with Virgin Trains
You’ll usually earn 3 Virgin Points per £1 spent when booking your train ticket via Virgin Trains Ticketing.
If you book your train ticket before 30th November, you will receive 9 Virgin Points per £1 spent (triple points!) and can book as far in advance as the system allows. This is the best offer we’ve seen.
You’ll pay no booking fees, and the app is very easy to use. You can also buy and store your Railcards there.
If you were to book a one-way ticket from London to Edinburgh for £80, you would earn 720 Virgin Points as opposed to 240 without the offer.
If you commute to work or travel often, the Virgin Points can really add up. For example, if you’re travelling from Oxford to London 3 days per week and paying £24 per one-way journey, within 4 weeks, you would collect 5,184 Virgin Points as opposed to 1,728 without the offer. If you combine this with earning Virgin Points via hotel stays, flying, shopping, etc, you can exponentially grow your points balance to the point where you’ll have enough for an Upper Class redemption. Read our guide on how to earn Virgin Points for inspiration.
You can use Virgin Points to get a discount on your next rail ticket. However, 1,000 Points will get you just a £5 discount (0.5p per point), which has horrendous value compared to spending your points on flights, upgrades, cruises, or experiences. You can read our guide on how to spend Virgin Points for maximum value for more details.
Things to Note
- You will only earn points on the cash paid, not the amount paid in Virgin Points.
- You should receive your points within 7 days of travel
Go to Virgin Trains Ticketing Here >>>
Up to 10 Virgin Points per £1 via Booking.com
This offer has run previously this year and will most likely run again in the next few months, but it’s a good offer. You can earn 10 Virgin Points per £1 spent on Booking.com in the UK or Europe, compared to the usual 8, until 2nd December 2025.
For example, if you booked a 6-night stay at £420 per night, you would earn 25,200 points (instead of 20,160).
Even if you were to spend these points at their lowest value of 0.5p on things like money off Virgin Trains (£126 off using our example), that’s still a 5% rebate on your spend, not to mention the discounts you’re already getting if you’re a Booking.com Genius member.
However, as I said in the Virgin Trains section, there are many better ways to spend your points. For example, a £2,520 stay would enable you to book a Saver Reward flight in Premium Economy (if available) for just 25,000 Points and £438 in taxes. The same flight would cost £1,934 if paid with cash. Taking the taxes and points into account, you’ll save £1,496 by booking a redemption flight, and you can do this just by clicking via Virgin Red when making your Booking.com booking. You would be getting a value of 5.98p per point.
You can’t book direct via booking.com; you must click through via Virgin Red via the ‘Earn’ button on the Virgin Red website or app and complete your booking and book in the same session. Once you’ve been redirected to Booking.com, you can book as you normally would.
View the Virgin Red website here >>>
More Virgin Black Friday Offers
- Wine: Save £83 on a Virgin Wines 12-bottle case, bringing the cost of each bottle to £5.99. From Rioja to award-winning Pinot Grigio, each bottle comes to just £5.99. Redemptions for 12 bottle cases have also been reduced to 15,000 Virgin Points to purchase (down from 20,000). New customers will get 1,000 bonus points. View the offer here.
- Marks & Spencer: Earn 8 Points per £1
- Deliveroo: Earn 7 Points per £1
- Boots.com: Earn 6 Points per £1
- Currys: Earn 2 Points per £1
- Lego: Earn 6 Points per £1
- Disney on Ice: 2 tickets from 15,000 points
- Wolf Alice: 2nd December – 2 tickets – 30,000 Points
- Hot Wheels Monster Trucks: 11th January – 2 tickets – 20,000 Points
- Strictly Come Dancing: 14th February – 2 tickets – 35,000 Points
- Tesco: As well as these offers, there’s also the 5,000 Virgin Points bonus when you sign up for Tesco Clubcard autoexchange – We covered this here.
- Lift 109 to the Top of Battersea Power Station and Meal with Prosecco at Cinnamon Kitchen for Two: 14,000 Points
All these offers are accessed via your Virgin Red account. You can then spend points via Virgin Red or transfer them into your Virgin Atlantic Flying Club account to spend on flights or upgrades.
View the redemption offers here >>>
The End of SeatGuru
The once indispensable SeatGuru site has officially shut down after 24 years. Once the go-to website for airline seat maps and individual seat reviews, the site hadn’t been updated for years since TripAdvisor acquired the company in 2007, and eventually stopped updating in 2020. If you were once a regular SeatGuru visitor, I’m sure you’ve noticed the lack of updates and probably stopped using it.
But what are the alternatives?
Many airlines now provide interactive seat maps themselves, and other sites can offer a fairly accurate representation of the seat maps. Take AeroLOPA.com, for example, a site run by frequent flyers since 2021. It shows hundreds of aircraft layouts to scale, right down to the window alignment and toilet placement. AeroLOPA is especially good for looking at the layout of premium cabins, but it doesn’t specifically label seats as good or bad, so you’ll have to come to your own conclusions. It also notes when the diagram was last updated. You will also need to know your aircraft variant in order to search.
SeatMaps.com can also be a good resource. It’s actively updated and covers over 1,200 aircraft types across more than 600 airlines worldwide. You’ll find detailed seat maps, configuration notes, and honest feedback and star ratings with photos, pitch data, and even links to onboard videos and 360° panoramic cabin views, shown in some cases. The site’s filters also let you search by airline, aircraft type, or flight number. Some rarer configurations are out of date.
SeatMaestro is another option. It’s an older site based on submitter reviews and is good for hearing passenger stories. Data here can also be outdated, and some aircraft types have very limited reviews.
Each of the above options has its own speciality, so the one you use should depend on what you’re specifically looking for.
Another option is to search for your airline, aircraft and row/seat, and there may be forums on the topic – FlyerTalk being the best option. You can also look at our flight reviews section to see if we’ve reviewed the aircraft you’ll be travelling on, or search using the search bar for all news and guides related to it.
Information about things like missing windows or limited recline still tends to come from independent sites; it’s always best to check somewhere that’s not the map on the airline’s official website before choosing your seat, especially if you’re paying extra for the seat!
What’s your top tool for looking at airline seat maps? Let us know in the comments below:
