Important update: This benefit will only be 10 in flight passes per segment, so you cannot use it for day passes. You can read more about this here.
American Express has been on a roll the last few days: letting cardholders receive $5 for downloading their app, choose their own 3x category on the business gold card adding AirBnB as a transfer partner, extending their contract with Delta and removing the 250k transfer limit and increasing the sign up bonus on the Delta gold card. They have just sent out an e-mail to American Express Business Platinum customers that reads as follows:
Business Platinum Card Members will soon be able to access 10 complimentary Gogo inflight internet passes each calendar year. Card Members will be able to use each pass for inflight Wi-Fi internet access on any Gogo equipped flight segment.
The fine print of a similar offer on the corporate card states that it’s good for “any single-use Gogo pass or All Day Pass for use to access Gogo’s inflight internet service on Gogo-equipped flights”. GoGo in flight internet is currently only available on 2,000 aircraft so far on flights operated within the United States, Canada & Mexico on some Air Canada, Air Tran, Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Delta, United, U.S Airways & Virgin American. Whilst day passes sell for $16, one hour passes only cost $5 so this benefit could be potentially worth anywhere from $50-$160 depending on the pass types you purchase. The passes are only good per flight segment, which massively nerfs this benefit.
I think that $160 in value is massively overstated given that for $319 you can get 18 day passes and also a Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1 Tablet. This is a classic marketing tactic and how GoGo generates most of their revenue, they charge a high fee to use their service and then bundle it on the cheap to credit card issuers and device manufacturers. That being said any benefit that is added which is positive without any negative changes is only a good thing in my eyes.
This benefit seems to be already rolled out to the Corporate platinum card and the passes actually aren’t passes at all. How it works is this:
- Cardholders who enroll in this benefit will have ten passes pre loaded to their gogo account.
You purchase a GoGo pass using a qualifying American Express cardThis must be purchased directly and not through a 3rd party vendorWithin 30 days you’ll receive a statement credit [A number of corporate cardholders who already have this benefit have mentioned that the statement credits near instantaneously]
Just in case you didn’t already know, it’s currently possible to get a sign up bonus of 100,000 Membership Rewards Points by calling and asking for it. You can read our walk through on how to do that here.
Hat tip to Tagging Miles, if you don’t read his blog then add it to your rss reader immediately
