Virgin Atlantic announces its return to 17 additional destinations

• 22 June 2020
• News
• Virgin Atlantic

• Airline set to return to 17 additional destinations across the network, including Tel Aviv, Miami, San Francisco and Barbados planned from August 2020

• This follows on from our plans to restart first passenger flights from London Heathrow from 20th July 2020 onwards

• The restart of our routes is dependent on travel restrictions lifting around the world

• We have put in place additional measures at the airport and onboard to ensure health and safety of our customers and our people

Following our recent announcement of our return to flying in July, I’m writing to you this week with news that Virgin Atlantic has unveiled more detailed plans that will see passenger flying restart to many destinations across the airline’s network. We’re set to fly back to another 17 of our destinations, including Tel Aviv, Miami, San Francisco and Barbados from 1^st August 2020.

The details of the new routes we’ll be operating from July and beyond are below.

*Virgin Atlantic will operate temporarily from Terminal 2 at Heathrow, due to HAL’s terminal consolidation. Virgin Atlantic will return to its much-loved home at London Heathrow Terminal 3 when demand at Heathrow grows, enabling Terminal 3 to reopen

Virgin Atlantic has taken the difficult decision to delay the restart of its London Heathrow to Orlando service and it will now resume on 24th August 2020. Our seasonal services from Glasgow and Belfast to Orlando will now resume in summer 2021.

We will continue to monitor our network on an ongoing basis and expect more flights from London Heathrow and Manchester to resume in September and October 2020.  

We are monitoring external conditions extremely closely, in particular the travel restrictions many countries have in place including the 14-day quarantine policy for travellers entering the UK. We know that as the Covid-19 crisis subsides, air travel will be a vital enabler of the UK’s economic recovery. Therefore, we are calling for the UK Government to continually review its quarantine measures and instead look at a multi-layered approach of carefully targeted public health and screening measures, including air bridges, which will support a successful and safe restart of international air travel for passengers and businesses.

Of course, the health and safety of our people and our customers, is paramount. Virgin Atlantic is implementing additional measures to offer peace of mind in the airport and when taking to the skies**. More information can be found here.

I also wanted to let you know we’ve updated our policy on change fees. For customers who were due to travel between 12^th June - 30^th September 2020, and rebook to travel before 30^th November 2020, we’ll waive both the change fee and any fare difference. If customers choose to rebook to travel between 1^st December 2020 and 30^th September 2022, we’ll waive the change fee, but a fare difference will be payable. For customers who were due to travel between 1^st October 2020 and 30 ^th April 2021, again the change fee would be waived but a fare difference will be applied. Refunds will only be available for customers whose flight has been cancelled.

Thank you, as always, for all your support. We’re so glad to be taking to the skies again and looking forward to working with you as closely as ever for 2020 and beyond.

Lee Haslett

Vice President UK & European Sales