point fu

So many people are speculating on what Amex is going to do with the Platinum card when they refresh it on Friday! People are scouring foreign Amex domains, looking at old staging servers, all in hopes of breaking some big news that most people can already guess: fee hike, some new coupon credits, some old ones will go away, some new design for the card. *Shrug* This image was leaked today and my first comment was "Wait, aren't you supposed to use the Amex card to chop and rack the coke lines ON a mirror?" and of course Tim shoots back, "No, apparently that's what the new Sapphire card is for..."

I think the E word was the word of the year at some point recently and yes it's cheesy in the same way the word "adulting" is cheesy but dang if  enshittfication  isn't the theme of the late stage capitalism we're living in right now. I'm sitting here very unsuccessfully trying to check in for my Delta flight and ruminating on the fact that mobile apps replaced thousands of airline customer service agents saving airlines billions of dollars and yet their corporate masters just can't resist the urge to outsource and penny pinch the IT millions that make those billions possible. The Points Guy was doing a bunch of retrospectives for his anniversary and this one  really drove home for me how much decay is just baked into our societal expectations now. Amex (and Delta) built some gorgeous new lounges built on the idea of quiet, calm, luxurious travel and yet we're paying a $700 ( and rising !) annual fee to have an hour wait to get in, no seats when f...

UPDATE 3/2026 : While not as generous as before, I did just get at 15,000 point retention bonus offer for spending $3000 in 3 months.  == The Amex Platinum has gotten better since the last time I wrote about retention bonuses , but the fee has also gone up, too.  I'd heard that they were now allowing you to request a retention bonus via the online chat app on their website so I gave that a try. Long story short, after 5 minutes of chatting in my web browser with a rep, my card has a "spend $4000 in 90 days, get 55,000 points" bonus/challenge on it.  It seemed like the rep was required to inform me about all of the new options on the card that made it worth the annual fee, but I just politely said things like "well, I don't actually use that very much" to each of the things they rattled off. After about a minute of that they sent me the spending challenge retention bonus, which I had to officially consent to.  We're definitely planning on doing that much ...

  ( updated June 2022 ) If you sign up for an Amex card through this link we both get a bonus! It defaults to the Amex Platinum, but if you click through on the 'Personal Cards' or 'Business Cards' links, you can see the referral offers for all of the various Amex Cards.  Brian's American Express Referrals  ↗️

 ...but only for four hours. Talk about the ultimate tease 😭 I was searching on United.com for points flights to Sydney from New York in August and sorta inadvertently spotted a really good deal in late May flying on one of their Star Alliance partners. Considering that we already have a trip planned for mid-June to meet up in LA from our respective hometowns of NYC and Sydney, I thought, "What if I went out to Sydney early and then flew with Tim on his already-scheduled flight to LA?"  The problem is that I don't have many United points. Nor do I have many Chase Sapphire points to transfer to United. I do, however, have quite a few Amex points, but they're not a transfer partner for United. The flight is actually operated by Amex partner  ANA , but ANA doesn't let you do one-way points redemptions directly . I had some points "marooned" over at Air Canada, so I figured my best bet would be to top off that account with Amex points and book there.  So I ...

Well, I just had my $550 Amex Platinum annual fee hit my account. I'd read online that people were getting retention bonus offers so I thought I'd give them a call and see what they said. Long story short: they're giving people 50,000 point retention bonuses since Covid has really negated most of the card's perks, but because they gave me a retention bonus last August , I'm not eligible. Furthermore, they told me if I canceled or downgraded the card, I'd forfeit those 50,000 points since they were considered a "bonus for keeping the card for a whole year". Well, you win some, you lose some.

Got some sad Covid-19 news from Australia last night: they're closing the borders to incoming visitors . Earlier in the week, they'd already banned Australians from traveling abroad, but this latest move was somewhat unexpected given the government's statements to the contrary earlier in the day . I've not written much about our impending Australia travel largely due to the risk that this could happen. Obviously there are people with much bigger problems than us, but it's hearbreaking to know that our friend who wanted to weather the quarantine with us has to do so by himself now. I can handle my own loneliness just fine, but knowing he's hurting and lonely is really fucking tough for us. I now have the lovely pleasure of another six hours of holding for Amex Travel to actually try and cancel my tickets. Can I just say, they're utterly unprepared and that their handling of this crisis has been an unmitigated disaster?

Yes, I was grumpy a while back and wanted to get rid of my Amex Platinum because its ever-shrinking benefits just weren't worth the high annual fee. Then, when I called to cancel, they just straight-up offered me 50,000 points to keep the card. Today they announced they'll be adding trip delay coverage starting the the first of January. This great news on top of the 5 points per dollar on airfare will finally make this my no-brainer card for charging all of my paid flying. I wonder if they're going to pull back on the 50k retention bonuses now that new card features are being announced... Feels to me like that big bonus was just to hold on to people until Amex could come up with some ways to revamp the card a bit.

I've complained about the Amex Platinum a lot recently . My most recent mis-adventure trying to use the Delta credit was sorta the straw that broke the camel's back, though. There have just been way too many cutbacks and nothing new or exciting to replace them. I gave Amex a call and asked to cancel my card. I cited my reasons, and also let them know that the card's one "killer feature" – 5x on airfare – isn't a slam-dunk with me because it doesn't offer trip delay insurance like the Chase Sapphire does. I'm not going to book, for example, our January Mexico trip on the Amex because it so reliably gets screwed up by New York winter weather. Renewed for another season The rep was quick to quote back to me exact totals for all of the card's benefits I'd used, but the bottom line for me is that the trend right now is negative – all cuts, no improvements. I asked straight up if the was a retention offer available and there was: $500 stat...

As I've mentioned before, Amex has been slowly devaluing and eliminating many of the Platinum and Gold cards' perks. Specifically, they closed the well-publicized loophole that allowed you to spend your annual Airline Fee Reimbursement buying Delta gift cards. This was a popular and relatively easy way to offset part of the card's annual fee so there has been lots of uproar online about this change. This FlyerTalk thread is tracking and aggregating people's individual experiences trying to use the credit on other types of Delta purchases. It seems like the consensus for the new way to spend the credit is this: buy a plane ticket that's less than $250, apply a $50 gift card to the purchase, and ta-da! the remainder of the ticket counts as a fee, and is reimbursed by Amex . I read through the summary and it seemed like our upcoming flight from Burlington to New York City would be a perfect place to try it. First, I bought a $50 Delta gift certificate from th...

Given that mainstream travel bloggers like The Points Guy are indirectly employed by the credit card industry, it's not surprising that I've not seen any of them reporting on this development. The short backstory is that you can actually use your Amex Refer-A-Friend link to refer yourself to a new type of Amex card (e.g., you have a link from your existing Platinum card and then use it to refer yourself to an Amex Gold). It always seemed a little strange to me to do so, but plenty of people have done it. Today, without any warning, Amex began deleting those referral bonuses (this process is often referred to as a "clawback"). In several cases, people have lost over 100,000 points. Folks in Reddit's Churning forum were the first to report on it, you can read the full details over there . DoctorOfCredit (one of the few bloggers who isn't indirectly employed by the credit card industry) has a summary here .

UPDATE Aug 2019 : Amex offered me 50,000 points to keep my card! I've been on the fence for a while now, but the latest round of American Express feature cuts is the nail in the coffin of the Platinum card for me. In April, they got rid of the Boingo Wi-Fi benefit Then, in May, they announced the end of the Priority Pass restaurant benefit Now they're taking it from "hard" to "next-to-impossible" to use the airline fee credit option That last one is the straw that broke this camel's back. Those $200 Delta credits were essential in making the math for this card work out. Yes, they're still there, but there's no way I'm going to spend $200 on baggage fees and on-board food/bev in a year. If this credit were across all airlines I could, but they make you choose a single airline in January for the entire year. Their bean counters rely heavily on these flaming hoops so they don't have to pay out for features that they used to sell you...

I just left the Apple Keynote in Brooklyn , where they just announced a major overhaul to the MacBook Air. The gamut of the screen they used in the theater made the new laptop look orange and I got super excited. Once I got to the press hands-on area though I realized that it was the same ambiguous “gold” color as the new Apple Watch. Girl look how orange you look! Just for fun and comparison (the lighting in there was crazy), I pulled out my new Rose Gold Amex to compare... and, well, one man’s "gold" is another man’s "rose gold", apparently. The card is just slightly lighter… (click for full resolution) If it had been bright metallic orange it would have been a no-brainer to get the new Air but now I'm kinda torn between this and the new iPad Pro with the keyboard case. Adobe now has a full version of Photoshop running on the iPad Pro and their demo blew everyone away when she moved from a flat Photoshop image seamlessly into an animated aug...

After upgrading my Gold card to Platinum at the beginning of this year, I was actually sorta bummed that I no longer had a card that got me a bonus on groceries. I did the math and we spend around $8,000 a year on groceries, and that's a decent amount of points to leave on the table by not earning some kind of multiplier. Then Amex rebooted the Gold card to help it compete with the Chase Sapphire line and they added a 4x bonus on "Supermarkets". Lots of the professional bloggers were sloppily reporting that this as a "groceries" category, even though the Terms and Conditions explicitly mention that there's no bonus at Costco or other warehouse clubs. I don't shop at those kinds of places, instead I try my hardest to buy everything at our local neighborhood gem, Essex Market . This place is the heart and soul of Manhattan's Lower East Side, and I love supporting the small Dominican and Chinese grocers under its roof. There's no way I would star...

While I do love me a good Amex Offer as much as the next person, I despise how they rely on "breakage" for so many of their card benefits – i.e., they intentionally erect flaming hoops customers have to jump through with the hope that most people won't be bothered. The Platinum card's Uber benefit is a prime example – a $15 credit (with a one-month expiration date) is added to your account at the beginning of each month. Since upgrading to the platinum six-ish months ago, I've had nothing but trouble trying to use this credit. Considering many people only use Uber for expensive rides to the airport, i'd vastly prefer a $90 credit every six months to this ridiculous setup. ( Sidenote: since you can only use this Uber credit for rides in the US, I'd prefer it be a Lyft credit ) UPDATE (25 Oct '18): Ugh, it's worse than I initially thought. Uber required me to "top off" my Uber Cash account with $25 because my estimated ride cost exc...

I needed to go from NYC to Louisville, KY and I couldn't find dates and times on the direct flight I wanted for less than $735 in Economy. I looked at other options, but even a 2 stop itinerary at crappy flight times was still well north of $500. Direct domestic flights to smaller airports are always ghastly expensive I poked around a bit on British Airways' website and found a great 15,000 point option for a direct American Airlines flight with exactly the dates and times I wanted. But there was one small problem: my BA and Amex point balances were both near zero . That's more like it! Looooove that transfer bonus I'd read recently that Amex started selling Membership Rewards points again (they'd stopped for a while) so I called in to inquire about buying some. The agent informed they're 2.5¢ each and there's an annual cap on how many you can buy. He also told me you can only do this by phone and only as part of an actual points transfer ...

We're going to Japan to ride the Shiki Shima train and I've booked the long legs of the trip : New York to Hong Kong and then Taipei to New York (we're bookending the trip to Japan with long weekends in two of our favorite places). But now we need to book the short legs between those two places and Japan. One of my weak spots with booking award travel is doing crazy-but-legal routings and stopovers. I'd used British Airways points for the Hong Kong leg, and BA prices all award travel by leg so there were no points to be saved by spending an hour on the phone with a call center trying to get an agent to book me a single flight with a multi-day layover in Hong Kong en route to Japan. ( TIP: There's a great online Avios calculator here ). Hong Kong to Tokyo I priced out the flights and found a lot of Ultra Low Cost Carriers (ULCC) offering this flight for US$150-ish (a.k.a. $350 once you pay the surcharges for seats, bags, oxygen, and toilets ), but we wanted t...

The blogs have been abuzz about a targeted 20% promo from Amazon and American Express. I set my Amex as my default credit card in Amazon and then checked my Amazon account with this link to see if I was targeted, and I was! I'm not a huge fan of Amazon because I find the whole experience so baffling unless you're a hardcore Amazon user. You can't even buy some things unless you're Prime, and still others you can't because they're Prime Pantry , or "this is only available as an add-on product". Furthermore, I hate how confusing it is to tell who's actually shipping your order to you and I've had terrible luck getting Amazon to fix purchases that go wrong from outside vendors on their site. End rant .  Because this promo ONLY applies if you spend some number of Amex points on your purchase AND if the product is "Sold By Amazon", I was dreading scouring their site trying to find something I needed that met the criter...

Doctor of Credit just reported that American Express is ending their OPEN business savings program effective June 1st 2018. This is a big one for me because I use the OPEN program to earn heaps bonus points and cashback for my company's FedEx shipments. I currently have a Business Rewards Gold card and without the bonus points, the card no longer justifies its annual fee . There's some vague wording about future Amex offers, but the only ones I've ever seen are for in-store purchases, not for actual shipping costs. Not quite sure what I should do instead. I looked at both Visa and Mastercard 's business rewards programs and only DHL participates (no FedEx or UPS). If anyone knows of a good card with a shipping category bonus, give me a shout!

One of my besties (who I sorta helped get on board the points train) just bragged to me that she scored a round-trip Economy ticket on ANA from NYC to Okayama (Japan) via Tokyo for 40,000 points! Fukushima in mid-April I had completely forgotten about this sweet spot in their reward chart – 40,000 miles for Low Season round-trip in Economy , and 75k or 150k for Business and First , respectively. Better still, you can do an open-jaw itinerary for the same amount (e.g., fly in to Tokyo, fly home from Fukuoka). While Low Season travel in January or February doesn't sound very fun unless you're a skier, note that a big chunk of April is also considered Low Season. Yes, you'll likely miss the sakura cherry blossoms in Tokyo, but a quick hop on the Shinkansen northward can put you right in the middle of peak blossoms. Sendai, Fukushima, Aomori, and Akita are all great choices for mid-April viewing. ANA has better than average legroom in Economy (34" vs 31 or 32...