Hi all,

Newbie here, your advice is appreciated.

My wife will in the next year or so be taking over a reasonably large family business (turnover c. £1 million) from her retiring parents. It's a retail business so there's very little corporate travel but there are plenty of expenses that could be settled via credit card, probably totalling around £150,000 per year. My wife and I would probably add another £50,000 to the total spend per year for personal use which currently we spend on a debit card.

So the question is, what is the most effective way to transfer our spend and the corporate expenses into flights? Our time off is pretty limited due to the demands of the company so our aim would be to try to get a couple of pairs of business tickets every year to somewhere warm with perhaps the odd few city breaks in between.

We're in the North East of England so KLM/Air France would make most sense as they have good connections and frequencies locally. BA would be okay although the one place we go regularly (Beirut, Lebanon as we have friends there, isn't a goer with them) and we've steered clear in the past because the connection timing doesn't stack up. Lufhansa/BMI/Swiss etc are out of the picture locally, although using them (or indeed any of the other big airlines) from Manchester airport would be okay for the couple of trips a year that we make although ideally we'd stick with local airlines.

I'm thinking the best option is an Amex Corporate card for both of us, redeemed to a Flying Blue account. How does personal spend work with Amex? When I had a personal Platinum card years back, I recall that they sent me a second card for business expenses, which came with a separate bill. Does a corporate card work the other way around in that you can have a second card for personal expenditure? Also, how does redemption work? Are there limits as to many cards can be redeemed to one Flying Blue account, for example?

Sorry for all the questions, but this frequent flying lark is a minefield to non-frequent flyers!