New Virgin Atlantic Sign-Up Bonus Up to 90,000 Miles and Is It Worth It?

I learned from One Mile at a Time a few days ago that Bank of America has an offer for 90,000 Virgin Atlantic miles with its Virgin Atlantic World Elite MasterCard®. However, to get that 90,000 miles requires quite a bit of spending and you receive various bonuses at various spending tiers. The credit card also has a $90 annual fee. Here’s how the offer breaks down:

• 20,000 Flying Club bonus miles after first purchase
• 50,000 additional Flying Club bonus miles after spending $12,000 in within 6 months
• Earn up to 15,000 additional bonus miles upon anniversary — 7500 if you spend $15,000 in the year on the card, and 15,000 if you spend $25,000 in the year on the card.
• Earn up to 5,000 Flying Club bonus miles when you add additional authorized users to your card

Diagnosing the Spending

As you can see, there are various levels at which you hit different bonus tiers. Assuming you were to sign up and want to earn some Virgin Atlantic miles, how much does it make sense to spend? The card earns 1.5 miles per dollar for regular spending.

• 20,000 Flying Club bonus miles after first purchase. It does make sense to make a purchase, yes.
• 50,000 Flying Club bonus miles after spending $12,000. You’d then receive 68,000 miles. This would give you 5.67 miles per dollar on your first $12,000 in spending. This makes sense.
• 7,500 Flying club bonus miles after spending $15,000 (or an additional $3000). You’d then receive 12,000 miles. This would give you 4 miles per dollar on your next $3,000 in spending. This makes sense.
• 7,500 Flying club bonus miles after spending $25,000 (or an additional $10,000). You’d then receive 22,500 miles, giving you 2.25 miles per dollar on your next $10,000 in spending. It’s not clear whether this makes sense and probably not something I would personally do.
• 5,000 bonus miles adding an authorized user. This makes sense.

So let’s say you stop at the $15,000 spending mark. That means you’ll end up with 82,500 bonus miles at the end plus the 2.5 miles per dollar for the $15,000 you spent. That would be 105,000 miles. I know that sounds like a lot of miles, but it is after a lot of spending so it’s best to consider whether the miles are truly useful.

Redeeming Virgin Atlantic Miles

Is this an offer worth getting? The thing is that Virgin Atlantic miles really aren’t that valuable. Virgin Atlantic has been a transfer partner of American Express Membership Rewards and Chase Ultimate Rewards for a while and, to be honest, I never took that option to transfer them. This suggests that the options for other miles transfer partners with those programs usually offer me better value.

My parents had gotten this card a few years ago and transferred all their points to Hilton HHonors. The transfer ratio used to be 2:1, but it’s now dropped to 1:1.5. That means you’d get 157,000 Hilton HHonors points by transferring your Virgin Atlantic points there. That used to be good for a four night stay at a top Hilton property, but since the devaluation last year, the buying power of these points has lowered significantly.

Virgin Atlantic will charge a fuel surcharge on most partners and the awards are extremely inflexible once booked. That doesn’t mean there aren’t a few good sweet spots or points where Virgin Atlantic miles are competitive. As an example, 40,000 Virgin Atlantic miles is enough for a round-trip flight to Hawaii by redeeming them on Hawaiian Airlines flights with no fuel surcharges. View from the Wing has previously put together a list of the 8 Best Uses of Virgin Atlantic miles. 

So is this offer worth it? For me personally, there are better ways I can allocate $15000 in spending and, if I’m going for this offer, I’d be missing out on other card rewards. But if you do sign up, just make sure you have a clear plan on how to use the miles.

Anyone else going for the offer?