CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) – In one of MBNA’s first marketing blitzes as part of Bank of America Corp., the company said it will start offering credit cards tied to Olivia, a San Francisco travel company that caters primarily to the lesbian community.

The Olivia-branded cards, which will allow holders to earn points for items such as airline tickets and hotel reservations, join the legion of so-called affinity cards offered by MBNA. The credit card company also offers cards tied to everything from National Football League teams to retailers such as L.L. Bean and Bass Pro Shops.

“We are a leading provider of travel and other lifestyle services to the lesbian market,” said Amy Errett, Olivia’s chief executive. “Our customer base is very much a professional one, with significant affluence.

“It’s also a market with a significant amount of pride and knowledge about exercising their spending power,” she said. “So it’s a logical and natural extension of our business to offer this card.”

Founded in 1973, Olivia advertises on its Web site that it markets to more than 50 million customers around the world. More than 75,000 people have traveled with Olivia in the last 10 years on cruises or to resorts designed for lesbians, gays and their family and friends, the company said, adding that the new cards appear to be the first aimed specifically at lesbians.

MBNA is a subsidiary of Bank of America, the nation’s second-largest bank, which bought the Delaware-based credit card company last year for $35 billion. Bank of America now has 40 million active credit card accounts, making it one of the world’s largest payments-services companies and issuers of credit, debit and prepaid cards.

“Olivia is a very strong brand,” MBNA group executive Michelle Shepherd said in a statement. “We look forward to providing Olivia and their customers with the best in financial products and services.”

Michael Wilke, who runs a New York-based Web site devoted to gay and lesbian-themed advertising called The Commercial Closet, said MBNA and Bank of America are not marking new territory with the new affinity card.

“The bar is higher than it was a few years ago,” he said. “A lot of companies have been in the [gay and lesbian] market for a while, some as long as 10 years.”

Wilke rattled off a number of companies that have marketed heavily to gays and lesbians, including American Express, Aetna, Allstate and Merrill Lynch.

“Gay marketing is fairly established,” he said. “I think they [Bank of America and MBNA] like to be in territory that has already been charted.”

According to San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co., there are about 15 million gays and lesbians living in the U.S. About 75 percent have incomes above the national average, and they are twice as likely to own a small business as heterosexuals are.

“Everyone likes to talk about the Hispanic buying power in this country,” said Gabriel Serrato, a spokesperson for Olivia. “The purchasing power of gays and lesbians is supposed to be about $640 billion this year.”

Errett said it didn’t take long for the credit card company to see the value in the lesbian market. “MBNA have been terrific partners to work with and they were extremely supportive,” she said.

While March 21 was the official launch for the new Olivia-branded cards, Errett said they were recently tested on one of her company’s cruises.

“We had 850 guests and more than half of them signed up for the card,” she said.