If you’re a member of Virgin America’s Elevate loyalty program you can get up to 2,500 points when you refer your friends, and if you’ve been thinking of joining, its a good time to get started because you’ll get 500 Elevate Points as a sign-up bonus.
Why are they being so very generous? Virgin Americans Elevate loyalty program has hit the four million member mark– and the powers that be felt like celebrating so they rolled out their Flights with Bennies campaign.
What can I do with 2,500 points?
You might be thinking 2,500 points whats the big deal? But when it comes to Virgin America this is actually a good amount of points, an amount that can actually get you somewhere. How? Well, their award tickets are based on cash value, so with this in play even this seemingly small amount of points can get you somewhere you might be itching to go, depending on the route you book.
It pays when trying to book flights with Virgin America to take a look at routes that are being sold at a cheaper price break, like the one between Vegas and L.A., and use your points accordingly. The fees are typically low with Elevate often costing you no more than five bucks.
Now if you have more than 2,500 points banked, or you have Citi ThankYou Rewards Points or Amex Membership Points, you can transfer over, you might want to take a look at their transatlantic flights which are really low in terms of points, typically costing between 25,000 and 30,000 points.
On the other hand, you might also score a deal with one of their partners, who use flat redemption rates for certain destinations. But as always those surcharges can get in the way so that is something to be mindful of when your booking your flight.
Their partners include Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Australia, Emirates, Hawaiian Airlines and Singapore Airlines. The other nice aspect of the Elevate program is that there are no blackout dates.
And last but not least if you’re a new member you could sign up get your 500 bonus points, and turn around and refer five friends, scoring 3,000 points in the process.
The Bonus Details
If you’re interested in getting the bonus points you can refer up to five friends to the program, via social media whether that’s Facebook or Twitter, or you can go old school and shoot them an email. For every friend who signs up you get 500 points, so it will take five friends to reach the 2,500 mark. In turn each of your friends gets 500 points.
New members can also go one step further and sign up for one of the Virgin America credit cards and get more bonus points. The Virgin America Visa Signature credit card comes with 10,000 bonus points, while the Virgin America Premium Visa Signature includes 15,000.
When it comes to earning points, with either card you earn eight points for every dollar spent on Virgin America and one point on all other purchases. The cards also come with perks like priority boarding, a free checked bag and no cancellation fees depending upon which card you go for.