Amex rewards experts.........offer advice?

I have an Amex card with quite a few rewards points on there.
I also have a Virgin FF account with points from previous flights.

Now my question, which is the best way(and most efficient way) to use points to get a flight?

The reason i ask:-
I booked a flight earlier in the year on the miles + money option and got a decent price, but didn't receive points for that flight.

Now i'm looking for another flight and find that if i use AMEX's own travel option they offer both a Virgin Flight and a Continental Flight, which i can book, and then use AMEX rewards to get nearly all the cost of the flight paid back to me.
Do i assume that booking this way i will then receive air miles from the flight as its technically a full fare purchase as far as the airline is concerned?
Also interestingly the Continental flight is a code share using Virgin but is almost $300 cheaper than the same identical Virgin booking.
So my plan was to book the Continental flight through AMEX's travel option, getting the flight $300 cheaper and hopefully getting the full miles from Virgin for flying on the plane.

Does anyone see a flaw to this plan, or a better way to do it?

It seems my post has been moved from "ask the experts" into this flying forum.

Although the question concerns flying, it is more to do with the use of air miles and Amex rewards and i think it was better suited in the "ask experts" as this is what i was doing!

I suggest you look at some of the Frequent Flyer forums for detailed information on the question you posed. Try Flyer Talk (can't give the link)

Thanks Rob