A recent piece on Head for Points highlights the return of a 36,000-point bonus on the Virgin Atlantic Reward+ card and frames it as comfortably offsetting the £160 fee.

That’s broadly fair.

The more useful framing of the question is simpler: what price are you actually acquiring Virgin Points at?

The 36,000 headline isn’t the full number. The £3,000 qualifying spend earns at 1.5 points per £1, which adds another 4,500 points.

So the real result is:

That’s the number to work with.

Using GBP/USD at 1.35:

The fee is fixed. The judgement is what that £3,000 would have done elsewhere.

In theory, an expat might give up around 3% by not putting that spend on a US card. In practice, that rarely holds across the full amount. Some UK spend simply doesn’t go through US cards reliably, whether because of acceptance, address mismatch, or just day-to-day convenience.

If you assume that roughly half the spend could have earned that 3% and half couldn’t, the blended opportunity cost comes out at about 1.5%, or roughly £45.

That puts the total cost at about £205 all-in.

Against 40,500 points, that works out to roughly 0.50p per point (about 0.68¢).

This is materially cheaper than my earlier speculative Virgin Points purchases, which worked out at roughly 1.14 cents per point.

This sits in line with how I’ve previously approached speculative Virgin Points purchases, where the focus is on acquiring points at a known price and then looking for situations where they clear above that level.

UK card economics are structurally weaker than the US. Lower interchange means smaller bonuses and thinner earn rates.

If a US card offered ~40,000 points for this level of spend and fee, you wouldn’t give it a second thought.

In the UK, that same offer lands differently. It’s closer to the top end of what’s available without stepping into high-fee products.

For anyone operating across both systems, this isn’t really competing with US cards.

It doesn’t slow anything down on the US side, and it doesn’t take the place of a better offer. It’s something you can do alongside that, or while waiting for capacity to reset.

More practically, not all spend is fungible across markets. There are always pockets of UK spend that end up local anyway. This simply puts a defined return on that portion.

There’s a reason sentiment has shifted. Coverage from Frequent Miler highlights rising surcharges, particularly on long-haul premium cabins. That use case has clearly deteriorated.

But that isn’t the whole program.

What has really happened is that the obvious use case has weakened. The less obvious ones remain.

That lines up with how I’ve been using Virgin Points more recently. The value isn’t in broad, repeatable premium cabin arbitrage. It shows up in narrower, more situational uses, where pricing and availability still hold.

If you were relying on Upper Class redemptions with low fees, the numbers don’t look as good anymore. If you’re more flexible, and willing to use points across economy, partners, or specific routes, there are still pockets where they work.

The question is whether those pockets are relevant to how you actually travel.

At around 0.50p per point, this isn’t a broad “good deal” or “bad deal.”

It’s a pricing decision.

If you have use cases that still clear comfortably above that level, this is a straightforward way to acquire inventory. If your likely redemptions don’t, the headline bonus doesn’t change much. For context, Frequent Miler’s current Reasonable Redemption Value for Virgin points is 1.5 cents each, comfortably above the acquisition cost here.

There is also the annual voucher after £10,000 of spend. I haven’t included that in the valuation here. It depends heavily on how you use it, and the same factors affecting Virgin redemptions more broadly, availability and surcharges, apply. For anyone already holding a balance and comfortable using it, it may add incremental value. For others, it’s not something to rely on to make the numbers work.

That’s been the consistent thread in how I’ve approached Virgin Points so far: acquire at a defined price, track how that plays out over time, and decide whether to reload.

Viewed in isolation, this is a solid UK offer. Viewed against the US market, it’s unremarkable.

But viewed through an expat lens, it’s something else entirely: a way of acquiring Virgin Points at a known price, without using any US card capacity, and while absorbing spend that may not have been optimally placed anyway.

Everything else depends on whether you can use those points above that price.