Virgin Atlantic is My Favorite Transatlantic Airline! Award Ticket Heaven!

I love Virgin Atlantic and can see why Branson is so successful.  Customer service, customer service, customer service.  I travel almost exclusively on award tickets and Virgin offers the best frequent flyer program I  know.  Their Amercan Express Black Card aggressively lets you add miles with purchases and  online double dipping (shop through their site for bonus miles on online purchases plus get the AMX purchase miles) and gives you annual bonus miles as well.  Plus you get 20,000 miles just for signing up and up to 5,000 more miles for additional cardholders.

Virgin has lots of award seats and award seat sales BUT you usually need to book early.  Sometimes you can fly roundtrip to London for only 25,000 miles from Orlando or New York and they offer one way reward tickets for half the miles.  Two friends of mine that are going on a transatlantic cruise with me in April got award tickets back from London to Orlando for just 12,500 miles!!!  (Taxes and fees are additional.)

And get this, when you call Virgin Atlantic you get a really nice British person who gives you his/her extension number in case you need to call back.  How great is that!!!!

The first words out of my mouth when shopping are "Do you take American Express?"  I buy groceries, gas, pay bills, pay travel expenses, everything with my Virgin American Express Black card.

To qualify it's best to call as opposed to doing an online application.  Their card processor often handles other cards you may have and they may have to lower credit lines on another to give you this card.  Banks are very nervous these days and want to be sure you are a good credit risk.