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Welcome to Card Talk.

The show where we help you decide if this credit card belongs in your collection.

The Virgin Red Rewards Mastercard.

This is a new card that is coming out soon.

As we're recording this, all you can do is get on the waiting list.

You can't apply yet.

But this is a card that's replacing the old Bank of America Virgin Atlantic Flying Club credit card in fever of this Virgin Red card.

Now Virgin Red is the Virgin Group's new loyalty program, newish, that is aiming to be the one program for all the Virgin Group properties, businesses.

And right now, Virgin Red and Virgin Atlantic are still operating as separate rewards programs,

but it's very easy to link your accounts.

And then it's really just one thing because your points are equally accessible.

Once you link your accounts, you don't even have to move your points from one to the other.

You can either redeem rewards through Virgin Atlantic, like rewards like flights on Virgin Atlantic or flights on Virgin Atlantic's

partners or you could redeem points through Virgin Red for things like Virgin Voyages, Virgin Group

Hotels, Virgin Hotels, things like that. So with that background, let's talk about the card, right? So when you mentioned Virgin Red and

so you can use your points for those things, one quick caution that we've heard a few readers

mentioned this before that when you're on the Virgin Red app, if you hit the redeem button,

there are not like so many safety steps of like, are you sure you want to redeem as you might expect? Like basically as soon as you hit the redeem button, that's it. So just be prepared for that once you download. If you're new to Virgin Red, you download the app and you're like, oh, I want to read more about this cruise thing. There's not more to read. Once you hit the redeem, you're redeeming. So just so you know.

Anyway, more about the card. Safety tip there. Yeah. More about the card. So this card's going to have a $99 annual fee, no foreign transaction fees issued by synchrony. That's kind of interesting. Instead of being issued by Bank of America, now they're going with synchrony. Syncrony is more known for like store cards and things. So I'm kind of surprised. They do have, they've done a few co-branded type things, not as many as other issuers. Earning rate going to be three X on Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Hotels and Virgin Voyages, 2X dining grocery stores, select streaming services, and for EV charging and 1X everywhere else. So pretty run-of-the-mill,

ho-hum, not very exciting bonus categories there, not even run-of-the-mill or a little subpar,

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