Sir Richard Branson has announced his Virgin Group plans to invest around £320 million on a string of new luxury hotels.

A new website www.virginhotels.com leads with the strapline: ‘Fancy getting into bed with Virgin’ and describes the project as ‘our next (ad)venture’.

The site says that Virgin Hotels will be a four-star chain that targets ‘high income, well-educated, metropolitan “creative class” customers’.

The first hotels will open in North America and eventually go global. Branson promises to “re-define the customer journey from pre-arrival to check-out.”

Passengers looking for the best inflight experience would be wise to stick with the Virgin brand, if the gongs handed out in a recent award ceremony are anything to go by.

Last week, the Airline Passenger Experience Association’s (APEX) annual Passenger Choice Awards lauded both V Australia and Virgin America for providing the “Best Overall Passenger Experience”, in the small and large airline categories respectively.

The awards are based on an online survey conducted earlier this summer, in which passengers were asked to evaluate their aviation experiences.

Virgin Atlantic airways celebrated their 10th anniversary of non-stop flights to Las Vegas from London at McCarran International Airport yesterday.

Dita Von Teese and President Sir Richard Branson posed for photos with the image of Von Teese emblazoned on the aircraft behind them.

She wore red Christian Louboutin heels, fishnet stockings and a red corset bodysuit with a Union Jack flag cape.

Virgin Limited Edition, owner of Sir Richard Branson‘s Necker Island, has unveiled the latest toy available for its guests — an “underwater plane.”

The Necker Nymph is part submarine, part airplane, allowing guests of Necker Island or the Necker Belle yacht to explore the bottom of the ocean in comfort.

Two guests, accompanied by a Necker Nymph pilot, can dive to the bottom of the sea and stay there for up to two hours, with a clear view from the open cockpits.

In California yesterday, space tourism company Virgin Galactic unveiled a craft designed to carry passengers on short flights into space.

800 press, future astronauts and VIP guests gathered in the desert for a press conference and to view the roll out of the world’s first commercial spaceline.

The design of SpaceShipTwo will be refined during an extensive test flying programme to commence shortly.

The era of space tourism has begun. Out in the Mojave desert, Virgin Galactic has unveiled, the WhiteKnightTwo, the new transport ship they’ll be using to carry their not-yet-unveiled SpaceShipTwo into suborbital space.

The passenger ship is then launched from the underside of WhiteKnightTwo to continue its ascent to the very edge of space, about 65 miles (104 kilometers) above Earth.

With a 140-foot wingspan, it’s the largest all-carbon composite aircraft ever built and many of its component parts have been built using composite materials for the very first time (A major benefit of using carbon composites is fuel efficiency.)