We’ve wrote about how the referrer bonus on American Express cards vary widely from between 5,000 Membership Rewards points per card, all the way up to 30,000 points per card. (American Express cash card offers vary somewhat as well.) These offers change regularly, and you might see 30,000 points one day, only to have it drop to 7,500 the next day. And vice versa.
Readers note that each time the referrer offer changes, the link provided changes as well. From what I’m hearing, it appears that the referrer bonus is tied to the link, and if your friend signs up with a link which offers you a higher referrer bonus, you’ll get the higher bonus, even if the current link showing in your AmEx account is lower.
Save those links! If you got a high offer, save the link and the offer details. That way, when it comes time to refer a friend, you can compare the referrer offers currently showing against prior links you have saved, and use the best one. These links often have an expiration and won’t work forever, but within the limited timeframe you’ll see various referrer offers, and you’ll want to use the highest one when it comes time to refer a friend.
Another tip sent in by reader Cody is that the AmEx app sometimes shows a different referrer offer than the website. Personally I’m seeing the same offers on both app and web – it may just be a matter of time lag when the app is updating – but it’s worth keeping in mind to check both and see what’s best.
Nevermind, links do not even work for a closed card.
If you downgrade or upgrade the card, does the link with the higher referrer offer still work?
Thanks. Just saw 30K referral bonus on website. Yesterday it was 25K on app.
“How to get higher on reefer”
I believe Amex keeps track of how many times the referral link has been opened. Example the first time you open the link you would get a Bonus of 100000 points say on the Hilton Honors Card, if you close and the subsequent times you open maybe a few days later using the same link, the bonus is slightly lower at 85,000 or so.
It’s random. They’re hoping that you click through with a lower offer. You can reopen the link until the offer you want shows up.
There’s some randomization to the offers the recipient sees (and it is affected by incognito/private mode as well, and whether or not they are logged into an AMEX account or not), but it’s not purely random. I’ve got a 4 person household setup right now and have been watching the referral system closely for a long time. It seems AMEX has some internal system-wide monthly quotas related to referral offers, and once AMEX hits their quota, all referral offers for everyone will drop down to the lowest level until the next referral cycle (which is some internal calendar AMEX uses, not exactly tied to months).
For example earlier this year I would see that when referral links were refreshed, you could easily get the 75K platinum, 50K gold, 45K green, etc. offers from any referral link. I tested all of ours and various ones I found on the internet. Then after a week or two, all of the same referral links would only show the standard 60k plat, 35k gold, 30k green, etc. no matter what, even in incognito. Meanwhile, the 75k plat, 50k gold, 45k green, etc. offers were still showing fine in incognito when going through public pages, just not referral links.
Then, another couple of weeks later when the referral cycle reset and new links were generated (some people get the same link again though, so you can’t always tell when the cycle resets), all of the boosted offers returned to all of the referral links. Then after a week or two they’d go back down again until the next cycle.
I observed this over a long period of time, always the same pattern. Most likely what is happening is AMEX has a certain quota for how many boosted welcome bonuses they’ll give out through referral links per period, after which it drops down to the standard offer. Meanwhile, they either don’t have a quota for public incognito offers, or have a much higher quota that isn’t generally reached, since I’ve almost always gotten public incognito offers to show. Though there have been a couple of small time periods where they wouldn’t show no matter what.