Reply To: Platinum: To cancel or not to cancel?

[ACK]

In a few months, I’ll have the same decision to make and I thought I’d collect my thoughts out loud. Currently gold with BA, but child #1 turned 2, so no more cheap travel, child #2 is on the way, so we probably won’t be travelling much anyway, for 2024. Then I reckon we’ll start again in 2025. So here is what I was thinking. I’ll soft land into silver for 2024, and unless I do anything about it, I’ll soft land to bronze in 2025. It would be nice to have silver, I found gold good, but not as good so that I’d chase it again. Silver would be just fine. So for me to maintain silver for 2025, I’d do a TP run towards the end of 2024, during the grace period before landing to bronze. I did the math today, and the cheapest to get silver is to do 2 nested SOF trips back to back on two weekends, that gives me 640 TP for £1110 (if I booked today).

Or, alternatively, I could just keep the platinum amex, with the annual fee of 650. For 2 years, that’s £ 1300. The benefits I’d use:
– HN credit 2×50 = probably £ 60
– dining credit 1×150 = about 100 (where we normally eat out, it’s usually 2/3 the cost)
– family travel insurance = 150 (we’d have this, which would normally cost around this amount)
– hotel gold statuses = about 150 (20% off with melia we used a few times)
– car rental = about 20 (we rarely rent, but when we did once, it was a good benefit)

So I can see 60 + 100 + 150 + 150 + 20 = £ 480 / year actual benefit vs £ 650 cost / year. So far math says not to keep the card. However, a BA silver onlyt gets us to a lounge when flying BA and with 2 kids I can imagine we’d have to lower our expectations and do flying with ryanair and similar. Where silver doesn’t do much, but the PP still would get us into a lounge. So basically I’m looking at £ 1100, the cost of silver for 2 years, vs £ 1300 – 960 = £340 net cost. So math says keep the card as it’s cheaper than chasing silver. Or, just bloody pay for lounge access for 2 people (assuming kids go free) with every travel which would be around £100 per return trip or so. Meaning that as long as we do more than 3 trips, it’s cheaper to have the card, than pay as you go priority pass.

Still not overly convinced, but signs point to keeping the platinum for the next two years, unless my maths is wrong.