AwardWallet receives compensation from advertising partners for links on the blog. The opinions expressed here are our own and have not been reviewed, provided, or approved by any bank advertiser. Here's our complete list of Advertisers.
Thanks to the Virgin Atlantic reward seat checker, searching for Virgin Atlantic Flying Club award space is now a piece of cake. The tool allows you to peruse award availability by calendar month, saving you from searching day by day or a week at a time.
In previous iterations of the reward seat checker, you could find Delta award space on a handful of transatlantic Delta routes. In addition, a workaround allowed for a bird's-eye view of Delta award space on virtually any route. Sadly, that functionality is now a thing of the past. That said, this tool is a boon for prospective Virgin Atlantic travelers and those chasing award space.
Here's what you need to know about the Virgin Atlantic reward seat checker and how it works.
Page Contents
How Does the Virgin Atlantic Reward Seat Calendar Work?
The Virgin Atlantic reward seat checker is intuitive and easy to use. Start here and choose your departure airport. You can select any airport Virgin Atlantic operates out of — including New York, Delhi, Dubai, and more.
After selecting the origin city, you can choose your destination and desired month of travel. We'll peruse availability for a June 2025 flight from London Heathrow (LHR) to New York (JFK) to showcase how the tool works.
Once the parameters check out, hit “Find reward seats,” and voila! All the award space in June 2025 on Virgin's flagship route appears on the screen in front of you. You will see the price in points for each available type of booking. However, you'll need to go through the booking process to determine if more than one seat is available at that price.
Awards with the red chevron indicate saver awards space, which is the best value you can find.
Viewing additional months is easy. Just use the arrows at the top right to scroll through the following or previous months. Want to see the award availability for your return flight? Just click the reversing arrows option at the top.
Virgin Atlantic will then show you the award space for the return leg of your trip for that month. As with the initial search, you can cycle through the months to see additional award space.
After finding availability, head over to the Virgin Atlantic Flying Club site and book the itinerary you found.
Some Examples of Virgin Atlantic's Award Availability
Looking through a few examples of Virgin award space, your mileage will vary, especially when it comes to Saver Awards. For instance, in May 2025, you are hard-pressed to find any saver awards from Los Angeles (LAX) to London (LHR). In fact, the only ones available are in economy.
Looking to the north of the U.K. and the south of the United States, saver award space is equally hard to come by in June between Manchester (MAN) and Orlando (MCO) — although there are few premium cabin saver awards on offer.
Looking ahead, saver award space is even harder to find in December 2025 between London (LHR) and Cape Town, South Africa (CPT). Also, the only available space is in economy, which is not ideal for a 12-hour overnight flight.
Bookmark URLs To Check Back for Virgin Award Space
Virgin Atlantic built this reward calendar checker with some excellent features that simplify checking for awards again in the future, looking to see if any space has opened up. The URL of any search contains the route, month, and even year.
Simply bookmarking this page means you can quickly return to the search results to see if any award space has opened up — or to find out if the space you wanted is still available. This bookmarking ability lets you take your planning to a new level if you are looking at more complex itineraries involving a couple of hops on Virgin Atlantic aircraft.
Virgin Atlantic Axed Checking for Delta Award Availability
Earlier in the post, we mentioned that Virgin's reward seat checker used to display select Delta routes. In fact, it's part of the reason why this now-defunct “feature” quickly gained a lot of traction.
By gaming the URL — editing the date, time, and to/from airports — it used to be possible to see the award space Delta made available to its partner airlines on several routes. Unfortunately, Virgin Atlantic clamped down on this, and it's no longer possible to edit the URL to see extended Delta award space. If it comes back in the future, we'll update this section.
But for now, if you're trying to get a better look at Delta seats, you can book through Virgin Atlantic; consider using a tool such as Seats.aero. Better yet, Seats.aero has a “Delta One Finder” which displays all Delta One awards bookable through tracked programs.
How To Boost Your Virgin Atlantic Flying Club Balance
Virgin Atlantic partners with several flexible point programs that allow you to earn the points necessary to book the award you've found through the reward seat checker. Virgin points are one of the best currencies for free (or nearly free) travel.
Here's an overview of the programs that offer point transfers to Flying Club:
That gives you a slew of options for boosting your Virgin point balance through credit cards. U.S.-based travelers can earn bonuses on any of the following and then transfer the points to Virgin Atlantic Flying Club:
- 5X points on Lyft rides through September 2027
- 5X points on travel purchased through Chase Travel℠
- 3X points on dining at restaurants worldwide
- 3X points on eligible streaming services
- 3X points on online grocery purchases (excluding Target, Walmart, and wholesale clubs)
- 2X points on all other travel
- 1X point per dollar spent on all other purchases
- 5X miles per dollar on purchases through Capital One Entertainment (through 12/31/2025)
- 5X miles per dollar on hotels, vacation rentals and rental cars booked through Capital One Travel
- 2X miles per dollar on all other purchases
- 3X points per $1 on the first $150,000 spent in combined purchases on travel, shipping purchases, Internet, cable and phone services, advertising purchases made with social media sites and search engines each account anniversary year
- 1X point per $1 on all other purchases
Note that you can't transfer Capital One miles directly to Virgin Atlantic Flying Club. Instead, you will need to transfer your miles to Virgin Red first. After that, you can link your accounts and use your Virgin points via Flying Club.
Related: Do Virgin Atlantic Points Expire?
Our Take
Holy smokes! We wish every other airline would take a page out of Virgin Atlantic's playbook and introduce a reward calendar tool that works and is exceptionally useful for its program members.
Typically, finding award space is a pain, given that you can see just one or a few days in a search. However, it is superb to be able to see the big picture and check availability for a whole year in a matter of minutes.
What do you think of this incredible tool from Virgin Atlantic?
For rates and fees of the cards mentioned in this post, please visit the following links: Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card (Rates & Fees), and Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card (Rates & Fees)
The comments on this page are not provided, reviewed, or otherwise approved by the bank advertiser. It is not the bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.
