Look what just showed up in my inbox:
Reach rewards faster with up to 65,000 Flying Club bonus miles in the first year with the Virgin Atlantic World Elite MasterCard® credit card from Bank of America.
- 20,000 Flying Club bonus miles after your first retail purchase
- 25,000 additional Flying Club bonus miles after you spend at least $2,500 in qualifying purchases
- Earn up to 15,000 additional bonus miles upon anniversary
- Earn up to 5,000 Flying Club bonus miles when you add additional authorized users to your card
- Earn 3 miles per $1 spent directly on Virgin Atlantic purchases and 1.5 miles per $1 spent on all other purchases
So really it’s more of a 50K offer than a 65K offer, but still, it’s not bad. And keep in mind that you can transfer into the HHilton HHonors program at the rate of 10K miles for 20K HHonors points, so even with the recent HHonors DDevaluation, 100,000 points is still a nice chunk of points.
Sweet, I just cancelled one of these, just after the anniversary points posted (30 days to cancel, keep the points and get the fee refunded!)
Is it just adding one authorized user or two? My email says 2.
Mine says two as well.
I grabbed the Amex version in July when it was same 65K offer.
I plan to cancel saying I don’t want MC they are replacing it with, but will then sign up for the MC version to get second 100K HH for another $90 AF.
It looks like 40k of these will get you a cross country round trip on V Australia, which goes for $500+, with shorter flights for even less miles. Not a bad redemption.
How are the taxes/fees on that redemption? I know they’re pretty bad on VS flights.
Good call, haven’t looked into it yet. I’m not sure how to find that out except to try and book a dummy award with no miles. Delta supposedly doesn’t charge much in fees on VA flights, but who knows if VAtlantic will.
MileValue did a few comparisons for Virgin America redemptions and they were decent, albeit limited. http://boardingarea.com/onemileatatime/2013/04/09/virgin-atlantic-flying-club-redemptions-on-virgin-america-are-worth-keeping-in-mind/
Think best value could be HH transfers. 100K HH gets you 1 night peak season Cat 10 (Koh Samui) – rooms go for $1K peak season
VAustralia taxes don’t look bad, and given that UR points can be transferred to top up the VAtlantic account, this could make for good use of these points. They also partner with Air New Zealand.
http://www.velocityrewards.com.au/content/Redeem/Airlines/
http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/gb/frequentflyer/fcpartners/airlines/airnewzealand.jsp?bfSubmit1.y=20&bfSubmit1.x=33
Good stuff, thanks for the tips!
Gunna have to pass on it this time, but Virgin, Amtrak, and Hawaiian cards will be in a future AOR for my international travel. Mostly due to Hilton locations in Europe 🙂
Thanks for stopping by! Didn’t realize Amtrak points converted to Hilton–that card tends to be obscure since there are so many other Chase cards with great bonuses.