One of the most requested missing features of Virgin Australia’s Velocity Frequent Flyer program will soon become a reality, with a new lifetime Gold status tier launching in 2025!

To earn “Forever Gold” status, you would need to earn at least 12,000 lifetime status credits, backdated to 2013. But there’s a catch: at least 75% of those status credits would need to come from Virgin Australia marketed flights.

While the new lifetime status tier was announced today, Forever Gold will come into effect on 1 October 2025. This is the same date that Velocity’s other new status tier, Platinum Plus, will also launch.

“For the first time since 2011, the introduction of two exclusive new tiers – Forever Gold and Platinum Plus – demonstrates our commitment to rewarding the ongoing loyalty of our most frequent flyers,” Velocity Frequent Flyer CEO Nick Rohrlach said.

This guide explains everything you need to know about Virgin Australia’s Forever Gold lifetime status…

How to earn lifetime Velocity Gold status

To attain Forever Gold, you would need to have earned at least 12,000 Velocity status credits since 1 February 2013 (or whenever you joined the Velocity program, if it was later than that).

Crucially, though, at least 9,000 of those status credits must be from Virgin Australia marketed flights that you have personally flown.

This means that status credits earned via the following methods will not count towards the 9,000 status credit requirement:

• Partner airline marketed flights
• Family pooling
• Flybuys
• Eligible Velocity points-earning credit cards
• Other non-flying promotions

Conversely, we understand that the following types of status credits would count:

• Virgin Australia marketed and operated flights
• Codeshare flights with a VA flight number and operated by partner airlines
• Bonus status credits from promotions such as Double Status Credits

If you have earned enough status credits to earn Platinum or Platinum Plus status in the previous year, you’ll of course be upgraded to a higher tier. But you’ll never drop below Velocity Gold status.

The benefits of Virgin Australia Forever Gold status

Forever Gold membership comes with all of the same benefits of regular Velocity Gold status. These include access to Virgin Australia and partner airline lounges, priority check-in, priority boarding, additional baggage allowance and more. The difference is that you won’t ever lose your status.

The complimentary hotel and car hire program status matches remain once per lifetime, though.

According to the Velocity terms & conditions, “Forever Gold Status will terminate when Velocity membership is terminated by the member of Velocity, including when Velocity becomes aware the member has passed away”. Velocity of course also retains the right to change the benefits of Gold status at any time.

How this compares to lifetime Qantas Gold status

By comparison, you would need to earn 14,000 lifetime status credits with Qantas Frequent Flyer to get lifetime Qantas Gold status. However, Qantas does not require that a certain amount of those status credits must be earned on Qantas flights.

Arguably, with Velocity’s requirement for 75% of the status credits needed for Forever Gold to be from Virgin Australia flights, Forever Gold may be just as hard for some people to earn as lifetime Qantas Gold.

At the same time, Qantas Gold status offers arguably more and better benefits due to Qantas’ Oneworld alliance membership. Virgin Australia is not part of an alliance, and while Velocity status does grant benefits on partner airlines, these are somewhat inconsistent.

It’s worth noting that Qantas offers lifetime Silver and Platinum status, as well as its lifetime Gold tier. So far, Velocity is just offering lifetime Gold.

We asked Velocity CEO Nick Rohrlach if he felt the requirement to earn at least 9,000 of the status credits required for Forever Gold from Virgin flights was competitive against Qantas.

Rohrlach told us that the bulk of members earn their status credits from Virgin Australia marketed flights. He added that Velocity also didn’t want to make it too easy to earn lifetime status perks, and that Forever Gold was designed to reward the loyal customers who’ve invested the most into Virgin Australia.

Now is the time to complete any Velocity status runs

Close to Forever Gold and want to make a (status) run for it? With Velocity Frequent Flyer also making changes to the way members earn status credits in 2025, now might be the time!

Any status credits that you earn now will count towards Forever Gold, once it launches in October 2025. But once Velocity changes status credit earning to be spend-based in April 2025, this will close many of the loopholes that make it currently possible to earn quite large amounts of status credits for relatively low spend. This is particularly the case for multi-stop Business Class itineraries which are very high status credit earners under the current system.

Join the discussion on the AFF forum

What do you make of Velocity’s new Forever Gold tier? Let us know on the Australian Frequent Flyer forum!

Matt Graham

The editor of Australian Frequent Flyer, Matt's passion for travel has taken him to over 90 countries… with the help of frequent flyer points, of course!
Matt's favourite destinations (so far) are Germany, Brazil & Kazakhstan. His interests include aviation, economics & foreign languages, and he has a soft spot for good food and red wine.

You can connect with Matt by posting on the Australian Frequent Flyer community forum and tagging @AFF Editor.