US Virgin Bank of America card shutting down.

Sad to receive a generic letter from Bank of America saying the Virgin Atlantic BoA USA based credit card program is ending. They are intending to move us to some kind of 'Synchrony' card, (which others do not rate) and no mention of a VS connection, or earning Virgin miles/ TPs.

So, unless there's something new in the works for US based Virgin Atlantic customers, it's off to US Platinum Amex I'll go. Earn the points spend with them and maybe take the transfer bonus whenever.

Sad to see this end, its been a great program for me as a loyal VS customer. Sigh.

Found this online about the 'replacement' card: https://www.virgin.com/en-us/virgin-red ... d-waitlist

Not very persuasive/ generous, considering Amex offer 100,000 points sign up bonus, which you can transfer at 1:1.3 multiplier, if you time it right.
Chase Sapphire also a lot better, with transfer bonus multiplier quite often also.
Both miles accounts valid for multiple airlines, so why tie yourself down for less miles?

Virgin clearly thinks US based customers can't figure out a good card from a deeply 'meh' one?

Aw man - I haven't seen the letter yet but it was a good source of 200-300 TP per year towards Gold status for me. Either got to make that up with flying DL F more domestically or upping the transatlantic crossings.

Reading the Virgin Red Rewards, there is no mention of TP collection so I guess that is just going to go away...

I read an article recently (that I now can’t find). The benefits seem very similar to the BOA card, main difference is you must be a US citizen to have the new card. BOA never insisted on that. I’ve had one (and a BOA bank account) for many years.

Might have to reconsider now whether I stay with BOA or move to another. (I only went with them originally for the VS credit card)

Aw man - I haven't seen the letter yet but it was a good source of 200-300 TP per year towards Gold status for me.
Reading the Virgin Red Rewards, there is no mention of TP collection so I guess that is just going to go away...

Yeah it was for me too, esp. during the pandemic, but luckily I've been LT Gold for awhile now, so selfishly (sorry!) TPs are less critical than before. That said, I think there are still Tier Points etc. with the new Red Synchrony card (caveat: not got direct letter info on the new card as yet) but the old VS card BoA letter says they'll issue you a new non Virgin card to replace this one. No use to me, will not activate it: bye-bye to BoA.

New Red 'sign up bonus' of 40k is p-poor, when you can get 100-150,000 from Amex, and transfer those to VS at x1.3. Plus they say bonus is "for new customers" and its not clear if we'd count as those? Really should be double that for loyal customers having to deal with the hassle of a forced card-switch.

I'm annoyed by this as all my regular billings (from Netflix to Amazon) go to my VS card, and I'll have to comb through the accounts to switch all those to wherever. Bound to miss one. Whatever - onwards!

Aw man - I haven't seen the letter yet but it was a good source of 200-300 TP per year towards Gold status for me.
TPs are less critical than before. That said, I think there are still Tier Points etc. with the new Red Synchrony card (caveat: not got direct letter info on the new card as yet) but the old VS card BoA letter says they'll issue you a new non Virgin card to replace this one. No use to me, will not activate it: bye-bye to BoA.

I'm annoyed by this as all my regular billings (from Netflix to Amazon) go to my VS card, and I'll have to comb through the accounts to switch all those to wherever. Bound to miss one. Whatever - onwards!

Hey there all --my first post here, having lurked for years

I am GUTTED and totally agree, Narikin, all my autopayments UGH.
Question to you: why are TPs less important?
(I got a totally useless reply about this from FC, which clearly knows nothing about whether TP rewards will be offered by "Synchrony")

Another Q: Does UK credit card offer TP? (Am US based but duel citizen with UK acct )

And --did anyone else have this issue?
I had earned 10 (TEN) vouchers, which both BoA and VA kept secret. I only discovered this when booking reward flight and nice Welsh cust serv person told me (very cutely regretfully) they had ALL just expired, I mean one week previously. The annoying thing is that these were completely invisible. No mention on BoA (rubbish) site, no emails, no section on FC member site. NOW there is a Voucher section (I have one new one. Yay) VA says it's a BoA program and they are powerless, so I contacted BoA but hold out little hope --especially now. (This was before the kill announcement).

Anyway, by way of intro, I've been FC since the beginning, flew about 6 of the inaugural flights, with Richard, as I was fancypants travel editor/writer & got addicted to comp upgrades. Sigh. That gravy train left the station decades ago. I completely depend on the card TP rewards now to maintain the Gold --9 consecutive years & more before, sadly demoted in between.

Aw man - I haven't seen the letter yet but it was a good source of 200-300 TP per year towards Gold status for me. Either got to make that up with flying DL F more domestically or upping the transatlantic crossings.

Reading the Virgin Red Rewards, there is no mention of TP collection so I guess that is just going to go away...

Yep I've enjoyed Gold status for 10 happy years by virtue of the bonus TPs from the BofA card!

And those bonus TPs (and Delta TPs) don't count towards Lifetime Gold... so even though I have met the '10 consecutive years Gold' requirement I'm not even halfway to the 7500 Virgin TPs required to get Gold for life...

I've been looking at switching to a Delta Amex and trying to earn equivalent Delta status instead, but it's going to be a stretch for me. The US VS card was really very generous.

It's been a good run I suppose...!

Just found this article --confirms TP rewards exactly the same as BoA card. Hope he's right! https://simpleflying.com/virgin-announc ... edit-card/

I'm equally gutted about this situation as I also rely on the TP from the BOA card to maintain gold status.

I know this is not official, but this recent article from Simple Flying would indicate that new US credit card will allow cardholders to earn TP as the same rate as the existing BOA card gives me some hope. Note, there is nothing on Virgin Red website to corroborate this.

https://simpleflying.com/virgin-announc ... edit-card/

Looks like its more official and TP will be earned on new US credit card at the same rate as the old BOA credit card.

https://flywith.virginatlantic.com/us/e ... ml#tsandcs

I am GUTTED and totally agree, Narikin, all my autopayments UGH.
Question to you: why are TPs less important?
(I got a totally useless reply about this from FC, which clearly knows nothing about whether TP rewards will be offered by "Synchrony")

TPs matter less to me personally because I'm Lifetime Gold now, (took 14 consecutive years of Gold) so they can't take that status away, Still would like some for the vouchers etc, but, getting to 1000TPs is less important than it was.

Agree with you about them very much hiding the vouchers - they really didn't let you know at all. The new website revealed I had 3 about to expire in a couple of months. Must have missed about a dozen, and paid out a lot more miles than I needed to when traveling with family!

Great news on the TP's. I've been using the VS BoA card as my primary card since I got the letter.

October 17th is the last day for Points and September is the last month to earn TP's on your statement.

Equally tweaked about this change and I also rely on the TP from the BoA card.

We have a final date (October 17) for the BoA card, but no date for the new card. That makes me worry that there will be an additional month gap of TP to deal with.

Anyone heard anything yet about applying for the new US Virgin Red card?

It seems BoA are automatically sending you new cards from their own (non Virgin) brand. I'll not be activating those.

The 'Synchrony Virgin Red' ones seems to give a 40,000 sign up bonus after $3000 spend, which is something I guess. Not received any application form as yet tho. Anyone else?

Tempted to wait a bit and see if there's a better sign up offer in the future. Usually they are in the 60,000 + range for such new cards. Thoughts?

I had my email this morning inviting me to apply which I can’t do as not US resident. My mate who is got his also, applied and was accepted within 5 minutes.

Ok - good to know. Just went through my spam and trash folders - nada there.
What was the title line?

Probly doing it in stages or something to not crash the servers.
We have two cards, one for me and one my wife. Neither of us got a thing, and we'd 'registered for updates'

oh well.

I got the email this morning (West Coast Time). Applied in 5 minutes and was instantly approved.

I had to login via the Virgin Red website to get to the page to sign up so that might catch some folks out.

Here's the link: https://www.virgin.com/en-us/virgin-red ... redit-card

Was instantly approved.

Sad to see that they have an upcharge of $1.99/mo for paper bills. I detest this sort of thing because I want to have all of my past statements in my archival system and every additional website that requires you to manually download a PDF means I have to manually deal with it monthly. When paper bills come in, they trivially drop into my scanner which uploads them to my archival system (called paperless-ngx) which performs OCR, uses AI to classify the document, and files it away. There's just no common way to get PDFs for every creditor.