Over the last few weeks, I know of various people who have been surprised to receive a 20% bonus when converting Tesco Clubcard points to Virgin Atlantic Flying Club miles. However, I held off writing this article until we could have some sort of confirmation that this was an all-inclusive promotion and not specifically targeted to select customers.
Details of this deal are now visible as below on the ‘Partner news and offers’ section of the Virgin website.
It notes a 20% transfer bonus when converting Tesco Clubcard points to Virgin Flying Club miles this summer.
Oddly enough, the Virgin Atlantic page on the Tesco website makes no reference to the bonus. Given that it’s explicitly mentioned on the Virgin website, you should have no qualms about receiving the extra miles.
An extra 1,000 free miles
In addition to the 20% conversion bonus, many of you will have spotted a mention of the long-running Tesco/Virgin incentive to Auto Opt-in.
For a while now, there has been an offer of 1,000 Virgin miles as a means of persuading people to automatically convert their Tesco vouchers into Virgin miles.
Personally, I don’t set my account to auto-convert and look to extract maximum value before converting my vouchers. As I explained in this article, it makes sense to keep flexible points currencies such as Tesco Clubcard points, as they are, in order to keep your options open.
This needn’t be a reason to give up on 1,000 free miles though. Anecdotal evidence suggests that you can turn this on and then off again a short while later and will still receive the 1,000 miles. Just be careful to do this in enough time to make sure your next batch of vouchers don’t ‘accidentally’ auto-convert if you don’t want them to. It also seems that Tesco/Virgin don’t limit this to strictly one bonus per account….definitely anecdotal and not guaranteed of course but you may want to experiment….
Should you convert your Clubcard points to take advantage of the bonus?
Just last week I looked at the benefits of waiting to convert flexible points currencies until a transfer bonus comes along, for maximum benefit.
Is this as good a bonus amount as it gets? No. In the past, there have been 30% and even 50% bonuses. Will those ever return? Who knows – what I would say is this: if you are likely to have a need to convert some Clubcard points to Virgin miles in the short term, this bonus is a solid extra.
If however, you have no pressing need to move these points to Virgin, there is no harm in waiting to see if a larger bonus will come along in time.
Verdict
Transfer bonuses of any kind are always welcome – even if they are a far cry from what they once were. Nevertheless, 20% is not to be sniffed at and at least Virgin is offering a conversion bonus, rather than yet another drab competition (looking at you BA)!
I won’t be speculatively converting, but if you were waiting for a bonus of sorts to come along before transferring to Virgin, this is a decent enough incentive.
The page with the offer details can be found on the Virgin website here.
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