American Express recently made a number of changes to their personal (5x on airfare) & business Platinum products (1.5x on purchases of $5,000+) in an attempt to compete with the Chase Sapphire Reserve (as rumored and somewhat predicted). They also increased the sign up bonus on the business card to 100,000 points. I’ve confirmed with a source that American Express have additional changes planned for Q1 for both the Platinum and Centurion cards.
The rest of this is just me guessing/making predictions. Currently the business Platinum product is listed as “The Enhanced Business Platinum Card®”, where as the personal Platinum product is listed as “Platinum Card® from American Express”. This might indicate that potential changes will only apply to the Personal card, but typically business cards are more profitable for card issuers than personal cards so the only reason American Express would be making additional updates to the Personal product and not the Business product would be to directly compete with Chase and their Sapphire Reserve product.
I also somehow think that these changes will have something to do with the $200 airline credit that the platinum card offers. Given the timing of these rumored changes (Q1) it would make since to change the terms and amount that they offer to not upset customers that had already used their credit. One of the big selling points for the Reserve product is that the $300 credit can be used for any travel expenses (and a lot of readers consider this worth $300 cash, even though I’ve tried to argue a counter point).
I can’t imagine that Centurion cardholders are particularly pleased with the current offering they receive, but at the same time that product is directed at a market segment that might not care as much as others.
What do you think will happen? What do you want to happen? Let us know in the comments.
Quit posting “rumors” that are clearly coming from AMEX. Either they act responsibly and release info officially or they should keep their hype to themselves. Really tiresome.
You’re free to skip over these posts. A lot of people find them helpful. Where else would they becoming from apart from American Express? I’d be worried if my sources were somewhere else.
Called to cancel my platinum last week and the retention agent made it pretty obvious that a significant amount of people are cancelling their cards because of the Reserve. She also mentioned that they were revaluating the card offerings, which I thought was interesting.
Did they offer you any retention bonus or just let you cancel?
More Centurion lounges or free guests to other lounges. Allowing the airline credit to apply to any travel and for $300.
#correction
It’s the Chase Sapphire Reserve, not the Sapphire Reserved
Fixed
chase is coming out with INK Preferred
3x travel shipping advertising telecom
80k $95 fee waived.
Tricky. Was planning to go for the enhanced biz plat in early december to capitalize on 3x airline credits. Any reports of shutdown for MS, as I would likely need help with the 15k spend requirement?
More Centurion Lounges please. Chicago would be nice. And the travel credit being a little easier to use (like on airline tickets).
I fly out of SF very often which has a Centurion lounge, so the Platinum card is definitely worth it to me regardless of whether the travel credits are inferior to the reserve card or not.
Same here from MIA. But if they can make it even better then welcome!
Yeah it’s great value if your home airport has a centurion lounge.