IMPORTANT: American Express suspends the scrapping of pro-rata card fee refunds

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• Paul says:

  27 Sep27 September 17:24

  I will still cancel. The price outweighs the benefits for me. Lounge passes with gold are useless in the North. Thanks AMEX for originally announcing this, it gave me the kick up the 4rse I needed to cancel the card.

• revlou says:

  27 Sep27 September 17:28

  LOL – Provably due to the many Hfp readers who cancelled cards in the last couple of weeks!

• Harrier25 says:

  27 Sep27 September 17:54

  Just a shame they won’t pedel backwards on continuing to allow me to pay my Amex card with my Hilton Barclaycard. That avenue has now definitely been shut. 😞

  • Char Char says:

    27 Sep27 September 18:01

    True that, I can’t get any business debit cards to work either now!

  • NorthernLass says:

    27 Sep27 September 20:24

    @Harrier25 ???

    • Harrier25 says:

      27 Sep27 September 22:16

      Doesn’t matter talking once the door’s slammed shut! 😥

      • NorthernLass says:

        28 Sep28 September 04:50

        It’s still wide open in my house!

        • Harrier25 says:

          28 Sep28 September 07:28

          That’ll be with Curve fronted though…that’s different.

• roger says:

  27 Sep27 September 17:57

  Is someone going to nudge curve to relent now too:)

  • G says:

    28 Sep28 September 03:33

    Curve Card is a simple but clever idea. Like Currensea.

• Luca M says:

  27 Sep27 September 18:01

  I think I was the first to mention it few days ago and no one believed me as it came through the app chat.

  • sloth says:

    27 Sep27 September 19:48

    the problem is whilst im sure you were told that, it would have been by an operative, 95% of who have no clue what they are talking about

• Mr David Laurence says:

  27 Sep27 September 19:06

  I cancelled a while back. Obviously you do get the odd HFP comments that like to abuse people that post.

  Amex is clearly changing a lot. They are revisiting the model.

  My personal feeling is they are charging more and downgrading the various benefits and services.

  I don’t think pro-rated refunds will save the day.

  They’ve removed benefit after benefit.. tightened rules ad hoc. And the customer service has fallen off a cliff.

  I had 23 years with them. And yet they seem to be incapable of sorting basic issues.

  They prefer card churn apparently

  • Rob says:

    27 Sep27 September 19:09

    The benefits aren’t being downgraded at all. If you compare what you got 10 years, or even 5 years, ago to what you get now there is no comparison. The only issue is whether the increase in annual fees justifies it.

    The tightening on rules re personal income is down to the FCA, not Amex. All financial services businesses are impacted by this – even HfP now has to ensure (and show to the FCA) that we do not encourage people to take out an Amex or any other credit card if it would be unsuitable for them.

    • Mr David Laurence says:

      27 Sep27 September 19:12

      Agree. It works or it doesn’t

      My personal feeling is the benefits are still good. The service misses the mark quite often. The service is a big part of the fee

    • JDB says:

      27 Sep27 September 19:30

      The collapse in customer service over the years is an issue. Amex was always the expensive player but its CS was a serious differentiator, but no longer is. It seems to be consensus that one can no longer rely upon anything an agent says and the service is hopelessly inconsistent which smacks of inadequate training, bad call centre supervision/management and poor internal communication. The chat agents are often unacceptably incompetent and one encounters language barriers.

      I feel overall that Amex in the UK has become very distant from its core customer and its extravagant pandering to the disloyal obviously doesn’t help. People sometimes talk about not doing x if you value your relationship with Amex but I’m not sure if I really care any more because they have become so arrogant. Thank you Barclaycard for turning up on the Avios scene last year.

      • Cranzle says:

        27 Sep27 September 19:49

        Is Barclaycard’s customer service is comparable to Amex?

        • TooPoorToBeHere says:

          27 Sep27 September 19:57

          The best of Barclays customer service is superb – native English speakers based in the UK who take ownership of problems, go away and fix them. I have had this, notably around the farcical mess over the big signup offer for Premier + Avios Plus a few months ago, when a very nice lady fixed it all for me.

          They do also have useless offshore people who don’t help. And some of their back-end processes are diabolically bad; they roll out new products without really testing their onboarding flows, and they clearly have a BA-esque stack of very legacy IT underneath their products.

          I certainly wouldn’t say Barclaycard is *worse* than Amex, and at best it is very good.

        • JDB says:

          27 Sep27 September 20:06

          @Cranzle – your question is precisely Amex’s problem.

        • RussellH says:

          27 Sep27 September 22:32

          In my experience, Barclaycard’s service has been consistently awful going back to at least the end of 2014. Far, far worse than any other card company I have dealt with.
          Since then they have given me £475 in compensation. This covers nine separate complaints.
          All the complaints were about their systems’ inability to award the correct number of points, initially on the IHG credit card, more recently on the Hilton card.
          They got the points wrong again on my Hilton card just this month; the chat agent I dealt with said that the missing points would be dealt with on my next statement – though I did have to the name of the specialist complaints handler who dealt with my last complaint.
          The very worst thing that they managed to do (in 2015 I think) was transfer my phonecall “to another department that could help” – the call was answered by a car dealership in Florida.

        • G says:

          28 Sep28 September 03:35

          Outsourced to India with woefully inept people? Yep.

      • zapato1060 says:

        27 Sep27 September 19:51

        Most of the time its quite surprising to always be told “dont believe what the chat is telling you”.

      • sloth says:

        27 Sep27 September 19:54

        Exactly this. I’ve been with Amex for 24 years (and counting) and was always happy to pay for the superior customer service and ‘can do’ attitude. Now that has completely gone and they are just shooting themselves in the foot. This whole situation is extremely embarrassing for them and makes them look like clowns. I wasn’t cancelling before but now im wondering if its not better to do that and go back to the hsbc elite card, although they weren’t any better c/s wise!

• Dave Barron says:

  27 Sep27 September 19:36

  I cancelled my Amex Platinum a few months ago as unlike many people so didn’t get a sniff of a retention offer and simply couldn’t justify the fee any longer due to limited travel. I had been paying £48 a monthly for the platinum card so I don’t know if that made a difference or not. My only Amex card is now the free BA one. I may sign up for Platinum again in New Year or more than likely will wait for the 2 years for a sign up offer. In the meantime I’m currently using the Premium BA Avios a MasterCard and obtained the enhanced 50k Avios bonus last month. At £20 a month I’m currently very happy with the card and would recommend it.

  • Mr David Laurence says:

    27 Sep27 September 21:23

    I cancelled my Centurion. Same reasons

• Susan Smith says:

  27 Sep27 September 19:46

  Feck! Just this morning I transferred the MR balance so I can close a card tomorrow.

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