American Express have just increased the sign up bonus on both the personal & business SPG cards to 35,000 points:
- American Express SPG Personal Card Offers Now 35,000 Points
- American Express SPG Business Card Offers Now 35,000 Points
A lot of people recently signed up for these cards (especially the personal card as it was offering a 30,000 offer via incognito mode). There is nothing worse than signing up for a card only to have the bonus increase after you’ve signed up for it. Some credit card issuers will match you to the higher sign up bonus, officially American Express won’t do this.
The good news is what they do instead is that they’ll offer courtesy points (no, I don’t know why American Express insists on calling these courtesy points. Most likely because they don’t want to seem to have a matching policy in case they want to deny the request for any reason).
Here are some tips for getting those courtesy points:
- Don’t message, online representatives do not have the ability to award courtesy points.
- Call and say you’re disappointed that a new higher bonus became available so recently after you applied (use your own words).
- The first representative will likely offer you a weak offer (e.g less than 5,000 points). Ask politely to be escalated to a manager and repeat your disappointment in American Express due to the bonus change.
- The manager has the ability to award the full 10,000 point difference, they won’t always offer it but they can.
- If you don’t have any success, hang up and call again (HUCA) at a later time.
One very important thing, if they say that a note will be added to your account (or an investigation will be started) then ask them add them to your account instantly instead. A note is basically useless and in my experience never results in the points actually being added.
If you don’t believe me that this works, you can read success stories from last time this happened here. Please share your own experiences in the comments below.
