In January I wrote that Bank of America was back with its 50,000 mile signup bonus for the Virgin Atlantic credit card.

They promote it as ‘up to 65,000 miles’ but 15,000 of those are at your cardmember anniversary and are based on spend with the card — 7500 bonus miles for $15,000 spend in that year, and 7500 more for hitting $25,000 in spend.

So I consider it to be a 50,000 mile bonus.

• 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 5,000 Flying Club bonus miles when you add additional authorized users to your card (2500 per cardholder up to 2)

What’s new in this offer for the card is that they’re now also offering a $100 fee reimbursement for Global Entry. So if you haven’t signed up yet and are interested in doing so, and don’t have another card or status that gives you the same, then the offer is $100 better than before.

The card used to be offered as an American Express (issued by Bank of America, not by American Express) but is now a World Elite MasterCard (which has some nice benefits).

There’s a $90 annual fee, and it applies even in the first year. Definitely worth it, in my view, for 50,000 points. Here are 8 Great Ways You Can Use Virgin Atlantic Miles that you may not have expected.

One of the popular uses for Virgin miles in the past was converting to Hilton at one-to-two, 50,000 Virgin miles would yield 100,000 Hilton points. But since the March 28th Hilton devaluation that doesn’t appeal nearly as much.

And it’s no longer even that good because they’ve dropped the transfer rate to 1:1.5.

Of course where paid travel would entail a fuel surcharge, Virgin adds that to the cost of an award ticket.

They’ve reduced fuel surcharges on economy awards but those aren’t the awards I’m looking for.

What’s more, departures in a premium cabin originating in the U.K. entail a substantial tax — on top of the surcharges. So Virgin award tickets often aren’t cheap.

(HT: @PointsCentric)

---

You can join the 30,000+ people who see these deals and analysis every day — sign up to receive posts by email (just one e-mail per day) or subscribe to the RSS feed. It’s free. You can also follow me on Twitter for the latest deals. Don’t miss out!