Velocity Offering Status Renewals with Points: Sign of Desperation?

Earlier this year, Virgin Australia began automatically extending the status of some Velocity members who were otherwise a fair way off retaining their tier under Velocity’s new system.

Now, Virgin has started offering selected frequent flyers who hadn’t earned enough status credits by their review date the option to pay Velocity Points to extend their status.

This isn’t a completely new concept, as Qantas already offers something similar. But the timing sure is interesting…

How Velocity status renewal with points works

Numerous Velocity members recently received the following email, shortly after their review date had passed:

Your Gold Status is being assessed. Over the last 12 months, your flying activity shows that you haven’t earned enough Status Credits to maintain Gold Status. We wanted to offer you the opportunity to maintain your current Status membership, and continue to enjoy the benefits when flying with Virgin Australia.

To continue to enjoy the benefits of your current Status membership, we’re pleased to offer you the opportunity to maintain Gold for a further 12 months by using your Velocity Points.

The email invites members to call Velocity to find out how many points they would need to pay to renew their Gold (or Platinum) status for another year.

It seems that this process still needs a bit of work. Some Velocity members say they received the email but were not actually eligible, or had already requalified for their tier. Others didn’t receive an email, but Velocity still made them an offer when they called during their review period.

Regardless of whether you get this email: If you fell a bit short of renewing your Velocity status and don’t mind spending some Velocity Points to keep it, you might want to try calling the Velocity Membership Contact Centre during your review period.

How many Velocity Points would you need?

Qantas already offers Gold and Platinum status renewals under certain conditions for a fixed number of points, with Gold requiring 80,000 Qantas Points and Platinum costing 120,000 Qantas Points to renew. To be eligible, Qantas frequent flyers would need to have already earned at least 50% of the required status credits for that year.

With Virgin, on the other hand, the pricing appears to be dynamic. It’s based on how many status credits short of renewing your status you ended your membership year on. The further away you were, the more points you’ll need.

For example, one AFF member was offered a price of 45,500 Velocity Points to renew their Gold status, after ending their membership year 54 status credits short.

Meanwhile, Velocity quoted Brandon from Point Hacks 98,800 points to renew his Platinum status. He had otherwise missed out on renewing by 158 status credits.

Is Velocity haemorrhaging Gold and Platinum members?

If the Australian Frequent Flyer forum is anything to go by, a large number of Velocity Gold and Platinum members have already started dropping to a lower status tier.

When Velocity redesigned its program to make status harder to earn, it did intend to lose some members at each status tier. It said at the time that status had become too easy to earn, leading to issues such as lounge overcrowding. Fair enough, too.

But some believe Virgin may have overcorrected. Recent actions indicate that Velocity might be getting worried about just how many tiered members it’s losing.

Bonus status credits: Virgin vs Qantas

In January, Virgin launched a bonus status credit promotion for Virgin Australia Business Flyer members. Then, a day before Qantas launched its own double status credits offer in late February, Virgin suddenly expanded this offer to all Velocity members.

Velocity even decided to apply the bonus status credits available through this offer retrospectively. That’s a really bizarre move, as these offers are normally designed to incentivise new bookings, bringing in lots of extra marginal revenue. That’s exactly how Qantas masterfully uses its double status credits promos – which only last for a week and rarely coincide with airfare sales.

By applying bonus status credits retrospectively, Velocity is rewarding flyers who had already chosen to fly Virgin Australia without the incentive of any sort of promotion. The only real explanation for this is that Velocity wanted to reduce the number of people about to lose their status.

So, how much interest has there been on AFF in the competing promotions for bonus status credits that Velocity and Qantas both launched in February 2026? Well, at the time of writing, the Velocity offer thread so far has 85 posts and around 4,000 views. The Qantas promo thread has over 400 posts and 26,000 views.

Now, just a month after opening up its general bonus status credit offer to everyone, it’s also launched a week-long double status credits offer on holiday bookings.

Too little, too late?

Even with all the recent offers, it seems a significant number of once-loyal Velocity members have either lost interest or given up.

A key issue is that, while Virgin has made status harder to earn, it hasn’t really given its frequent flyers any extra carrots to make up for that.

For example, Virgin still only has seven airport lounges, and its lounge food & drink menu has barely changed in years. The wine is barely drinkable, and unlike in the Qantas lounges, there are no spirits available.

Perhaps Virgin will be more comfortable spending the money needed to improve its lounge offerings once fewer people have access. By that point, though, those flyers who already switched to Qantas won’t get to experience the improved offering and may never return.

The fact is, while Virgin Australia is a great airline to fly with, it has a much smaller network and weaker airline partnerships compared to Qantas. So, Virgin’s loyalty program cannot merely match Qantas’ offering. It needs to beat it.

Meanwhile, AFF members who hold Virgin’s new ultra-elite Platinum Plus tier have been commenting online the benefits have so far felt lacklustre. Qantas’ Platinum One tier blows it out of the water.

Perhaps I’m wrong, and Velocity is actually very comfortable with how things are going. Its membership base is still growing overall, and the Velocity program remains profitable. But it does seem that Velocity needs a bit of a reset after its changes to status backfired. Incoming CEO Andrew Cleary has his work cut out for him!