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@HampshireHog – while I imagine it’s fun to play to the crowd with some numpty comments, if you had actually followed the story you would perhaps understand what is likely to have happened – there are actually quite a few red flags and inconsistencies.
When people are honest and transparent enough to recount a very personal situation one can feel sympathetic but also learn something (including that Amex is in a difficult phase currently so more proactive in cleaning house) rather than using it as an opportunity to criticise.
@HampshireHog – while I imagine it’s fun to play to the crowd with some numpty comments, if you had actually followed the story you would perhaps understand what is likely to have happened – there are actually quite a few red flags and inconsistencies.
When people are honest and transparent enough to recount a very personal situation one can feel sympathetic but also learn something (including that Amex is in a difficult phase currently so more proactive in cleaning house) rather than using it as an opportunity to criticise.
Actually I have followed the story and it may very well be retirement and or chasing tier points. But my point still stands that they may well jump on what are in effect minor transgressions and use those as an excuse to dump long standing clients they perhaps decide don’t fit their criteria and are unprofitable, partly ironically as a result of trying to take advantage of the very promotions they are pushing to what appear to their advertising to empty headed new prospective customers. One can only conclude as I think you imply that they really do seem to have lost their way in deciding what customers they want?
Reading through the comments, I still don’t understand what the OP’s position is. Although new to this forum, I’ve been around a while and the complex web of multiple cards, multiple supplementary cards from family members etc likely flags someone as ‘gaming’ the system, so not illegal but also not something that Amex deems to be fair use of the cards. I’m sure Amex don’t want to play the game by putting in rules to try to lock down on every eventuality so have the ‘get out’ clause of being able to close accounts without reason.
Would be interesting to understand how the OP was ‘gaming’ in this way, in more detail, if indeed, that is the reason for the closure – for example, how would being a supplementary card holder for multiple family members and also being a primary cardholder benefit him?
Are you asking why you’d want a supplementary card on family members cards aswell as having your own card?
Making the best use of Amex Offers and hitting early spend targets.
I’ve been reading through the thread since the start as it does seem like some sequence of events has triggered a review and Amex just didn’t like what they saw and as another comment says the OPs name has ended up on a spreadsheet and unfortunately been cancelled. There may not have been one single thing that was so terrible he should be cancelled but a build up on the wrong transgressions (for AMEX) has lead to it.
Sometimes it’s just best to move on with life HSBC Premier or Barclaycard Avios are good alternatives.
I sympathise with you Metty, I know I would feel insulted and peed off if I was treated this way by Amex.
I get that Amex can choose who it wants to do business with, but the two things I find unacceptable are cancelling your family members’ cards and not communicating the cancellations.
Amex really ought to consider the reputational damage resulting from the way they are behaving of late. Once upon a time, not that long ago, everyone loved Amex and praised their customer service. Nowadays no-one has anything good to say about them.
Once upon a time, not that long ago, everyone loved Amex and praised their customer service. Nowadays no-one has anything good to say about them.
Once they went down the road of leaving it open for churning and abuse, it was always going to be downhill.
They could’ve easily limited the sign up bonuses or restricted it to once every 5 years.
Could’ve limited supp cards to max 2. Imagine getting a hotel offer on 6 supp cards. It all adds up.
All that has to have a knock on impact somewhere.@metty Sorry to read this, Amex have treated you in a very shabby fashion. Presumably they have been happy to receive your annual (rather exorbitant) yearly fees, and all the transaction fees you have made over the last 30 odd years.
It’s beyond me why they introduce such things as TP’s for spend and then get all angsty when someone actually tries to use it, everything you did appears to have been allowable in line with their T&C’s. What a nightmare of a company to deal with. The other week we paid off my OH’s card with my bank card, as mine was by the landline and his was upstairs. We will probably be banned now, due to laziness.
@Misty – it’s not just the OP that Amex has treated shabbily, it’s all longer term loyal customers that aren’t churning, asking for retentions or generally gaming the system but nevertheless have to pay for all those shenanigans. They did give BAPP holders a 15th anniversary 15k Avios gift many years ago, but I can’t think of any other general activity to encourage loyalty/retention.
You touch on one important thing when you refer to things that are “allowable in line with their T&C’s” but that doesn’t protect anyone as there are plenty of things that people do which aren’t expressly ‘disallowed’ but which Amex quite reasonably frowns upon, tolerates but then reaches a cumulative threshold that upsets them, so doing the ‘right thing’ does matter if someone values their Amex relationship. Those whose Creation accounts were closed were busy saying they did nothing wrong, were within the terms etc. as well.
They can (and do) refuse to give retention bonuses so they’ve only got themselves to blame if it hurts them!
They can (and do) refuse to give retention bonuses so they’ve only got themselves to blame if it hurts them!
The point is that it doesn’t hurt Amex; it’s other customers, not the firm or its shareholders, that have to pay for this ridiculous largesse. Amex loves churning and retentions because of the unique way they publicly calculate and report new customer acquisitions and retentions. The problem Amex is now attempting to address rather clumsily is that partly through their own incompetence and partly because of tougher economic times the strategy isn’t working, they are suffering higher bad debts and they need to reduce the credit book and reduce costs because they can’t really push up fees again on Plat or Gold. That means they no longer have as much in the way of customer fees to hand out, so they are in a bind.
What’s particularly strange about Amex in the UK is that they are essentially bidding against themselves. In the US, there are loads of high roller cards (and plenty of people who want a wallet full of them, cost no object) from lots of competitors and there are plenty of fees sloshing around to pay all these bribes. Here there are very few cards in the £500+ fee range and seemingly a very small market appetite for coupon book type offerings that work so well in the US. Amex has also benefitted from really quite dopey legacy UK banks but they are now all waking up to the (higher) paid credit card market with quite simple offerings that are doing well and the likes of Revolut are testing out expensive card products. They will all eat into Amex’s dwindling market share until Amex recognises that there is a problem, that the UK isn’t the same as the US and that ultimately you need to offer the right product – just endlessly bribing people to take out or hang on to a bad product is not a viable long term strategy.
The other week we paid off my OH’s card with my bank card, as mine was by the landline and his was upstairs. We will probably be banned now, due to laziness.
I think this is just over thinking and over worrying.
AMEX have had a crackdown with warning letters to people regularly paying off personal cards from a business bank account and vice versa (which I think is a breach of the T&Cs) but I’ve yet to hear of them doing anything where a couple living at the same address pay off each others cards especially as a one off error.
That’s confused me a bit as don’t you have to link a debit card to your Amex account before you can pay with it? So if you use a different card you have to unlink the one attached and re-attached the new one? That’s how my account seems to work, anyway.
Though maybe it’s different for phone payments 🤷♀️
The other week we paid off my OH’s card with my bank card, as mine was by the landline and his was upstairs. We will probably be banned now, due to laziness.
I think this is just over thinking and over worrying.
AMEX have had a crackdown with warning letters to people regularly paying off personal cards from a business bank account and vice versa (which I think is a breach of the T&Cs) but I’ve yet to hear of them doing anything where a couple living at the same address pay off each others cards especially as a one off error.
Thank goodness for that. I’m only just getting started so it would be a shame if it all came crashing down.
I did have an Amex 15 or so years ago for approx 5 years, can’t remember why I ditched it (maybe the fees or lack of opportunity to use the benefits due to youngish kids.)
What I also think of as sad is that at that time Amex appeared to be held in high esteem in the UK especially for customer service, people would comment when I got out my gold card. lol. They were up there with a few other exemplary companies like John Lewis, Harvey Nicks, M&S etc although I know things have changed a lot over the intervening years, and some of these have gone to pot a bit as well.
They can (and do) refuse to give retention bonuses so they’ve only got themselves to blame if it hurts them!
The point is that it doesn’t hurt Amex; it’s other customers, not the firm or its shareholders, that have to pay for this ridiculous largesse.
That simply isn’t true.
If all retention was disallowed and everyone stopped churning do you think Amex would cut the annual fee on Platinum? Of course not. They will charge what works and bank the difference.
They can (and do) refuse to give retention bonuses so they’ve only got themselves to blame if it hurts them!
The point is that it doesn’t hurt Amex; it’s other customers, not the firm or its shareholders, that have to pay for this ridiculous largesse.
That simply isn’t true.
If all retention was disallowed and everyone stopped churning do you think Amex would cut the annual fee on Platinum? Of course not. They will charge what works and bank the difference.
I’m afraid it is totally true. A large part of the fee goes towards SUBs and retentions but it’s a bit of a vicious circle when they are by far the biggest benefit.
You suggest that that Amex would trouser the difference if they stopped all these handouts, but that doesn’t work because they can’t stop unless they spend more on providing better and genuine benefits. The problem is that the UK product (notably Plat) isn’t good enough, appealing to far too few people, so can’t stand on its own two feet.
I know we are diverging from the focus, but I wonder what @JDB would think for an ideal Platinum card. Except from reducing the fee, I am not sure what Amex can realistically add? In the US, it turned into a discount coupon book for streaming, gym, Walmart (!?!?) etc. In EU it does not seem very generous either.
I think it is time to accept that Belle Epoque of Plat is way behind us.
I agree about the Plat card, it’s really missing a significant USP. Hotel statuses have been watered down, lounge access isn’t guaranteed, the dining and HN credits can be difficult to use if you live away from the large cities. The only thing for me at the moment that makes the fee justifiable is the retention bonuses which is just ludicrous.
A start would be to offer the option to include pre-existing health conditions to the travel insurance and perhaps getting rid of the overseas currency conversion fee; after all, it is sold mainly on travel benefits.
I remember the old Natwest Black Card that covered the traveller, their family and anyone travelling with the cardholder, irrespective of age and pre-existing conditions, providing everyone was fit to travel. This obviously couldn’t be maintained but it was certainly a huge benefit at the time, especially for travel with elderly relatives.
I know we are diverging from the focus, but I wonder what @JDB would think for an ideal Platinum card. Except from reducing the fee, I am not sure what Amex can realistically add? In the US, it turned into a discount coupon book for streaming, gym, Walmart (!?!?) etc. In EU it does not seem very generous either.
I think it is time to accept that Belle Epoque of Plat is way behind us.
@can2 – I don’t think the issue is Amex adding benefits to the Plat (and maybe Gold) it’s more that the product needs a complete rethink for the UK market. Amex is trying to use its US playbook in a very dynamic, discriminating and competitive UK marketplace and similarly imposes its US ideas in other European countries to little effect. The current offering feels very dated and not well suited to modern lifestyles. There is also a real problem with Platinum being a very expensive flagship product but offering very middle of the road benefits. In the US there are vast numbers of people who are proud to have a walletful of cards even if they make no financial sense and flashing a fancy card is seen as a status symbol which it generally isn’t here. I won’t think the coupon book principle works at all well in the UK and once you start having to add up all the bits you have lost a lot of potential customers.There’s a problem in advertising the Plat as the THE ultimate travel card when it’s actually the Gold card that offers good benefits for travellers. It’s ridiculous to have the most expensive card (ex Centurion) with the lowest MR offer and anecdotally, the worst offers.
Plat needs to smarten up the insurance product so as to stop excluding 1/3 of the population who have common pre-existing conditions and they need radically to improve some sections eg travel inconvenience. Beyond that they need to get some more upmarket and aspirational hotel groups on board. If they want to go down the credits route they need to give people more leeway on how they spend what is effectively their own money rather than tie them to HN and the Ivy.
The hire car benefits are so widely available as to be pointless and I think the hotel benefits (including FHR) are of minimal value and easily sourced elsewhere at more competitive prices.
PP/lounge access seems to be an issue and for many a bit useless. If the Platinum customer is supposed to be what Amex wants, then they are very likely to have lounge access from their airline ticket or status anyway. Independent lounge access is also now so widely available on so many cards or directly and the quality of those PP lounges so poor, it seems rather pointless. Amex could get round that by building more of its own lounges that are more at the premium end.
Other cards offer contemporary benefits like subscriptions, WeWork, brokerage or crypto accounts etc. Unfortunately Amex UK is starting in the wrong place and has shockingly poor management; they need to make some external appointments.
The total desperation with all these monumental SUBs followed by retention two months later is just so palpably embarrassing. The very amateur toying with split SUBs, removal of pro-rata refunds, then non implementation, failure to clarify whether dining / HN credits will run into 2025 is all just so laughably poor. The current management has also presided over a total collapse in customer service.
The BAPP is a successful product and the only one with a USP, something Amex likes to congratulate itself for but get somewhat coy when challenged that all the enhancements are in fact driven by BA and Avios.
We are now living in a different world. Show me one product / hotel status / credit card privilege that got better over time!
That’s the exact reason people like us are rather aggressive with these products. Fill it up before it is too late. Because all of us know that it will get worse. For the Plat, I am curious what they will do in 2025 when Harvey deal is over. Am I expecting anything better? No.It’s really clear Amex has lost the plot.
They’ve obviously introduced a line into their customer evaluation algorithm that says “subtract person’s age from 60” or near. This will give a number of years left in which Amex cam expect the person is likely to remain employed. This is a really key number which they are giving a huge weighting.
Their algorithm will then potentiate that future-years-will-still-be-working score by, say multiplying it by a number determined by the person’s “Occupation”.
Occupation is an indicator for many things. But Amex is clearly also weighting Occupation type to give a score for Occupation, to multiply by the likely number of future years the employee will be spending OPM (“Other People’s Money”) Amex calculated based on their age.
The problem is that the weighting of these 2 fields – number of future years their age says the person can still be expected to be in employment – and their likelihood of their occupation meaning they will have large expenses that can be put through Amex for those years – seems to have got out of control.
Obvs there will be far finer factors also statistically connected with Occupation such as social status implying all sorts of things including job security. And other finer factors such as statistically expected health, asociated with age. Such as if the person has, say, x years between age 25 and 45 in front of them, their “life expensses” for entertainment, home, children can be scored highly for potential for future Amex spend. And years still available in close to that band, have high spend such as expenses reclaimable from employer, in many occupations. So Amex would score applicants with those particular years left, highly.
All fine for attracting and assessing new applicants. And I will take a guess Amex UK would love to introduce a newly named product to attract just these high scorers. But I don’t see Amex doing this internationally. So I’m guessing Amex isn’t allowing the UK to do this.
Meanwhile given changing credit conditions in rhe UK, Amex is also under pressure to clean up their book of existing credit they’ve extended and to bring down their overall exposure.
So you can see why Amex seems to be making decisions that break longstanding relationships with existing cardholders. But why not run an intelligent, focussed,determined,transparent and sustained campaign openly addressing these consumers to bring in the early-career cardholders you want in the UK and get them onboard first?
Currently Amex is throwing out existing reliable customers who might newly reflect as suboptimal in their revised algorithm, if they were new customers.
This is before Amex has done anything serious to bring in the new customers we have now worked out they prefer.Why throw the baby out with the bathwater? Until you’ve got the volume of new customers you want, perhaps lighten the punishment in your new algorithms for existing customers on the years-left-in-employment number. Or introduce a new ‘number of years as existing customer” factor to counterbalance some of the age factor’s negative effects on the number-of-high-spend-years-left factor. So you aren’t having to hide behind rules intended to protect you from criminals in order to terminate people summarily who’ve always paid their bills for over 30 years without having to provide an explanation and without even showing respect for their decades of loyalty.
Good points.
However I am still not sure what you think as an overhaul.
We all agree about the downsides of the product and Amex’s poor management, but you only listed few “contemporary” options like subscriptions, crypto etc. What else? Why would I pay for Plat for a subscription cash back? What is the USP or the Wauw factor?I know we are diverging from the focus, but I wonder what @JDB would think for an ideal Platinum card. Except from reducing the fee, I am not sure what Amex can realistically add? In the US, it turned into a discount coupon book for streaming, gym, Walmart (!?!?) etc. In EU it does not seem very generous either.
I think it is time to accept that Belle Epoque of Plat is way behind us.
@can2 – I don’t think the issue is Amex adding benefits to the Plat (and maybe Gold) it’s more that the product needs a complete rethink for the UK market. Amex is trying to use its US playbook in a very dynamic, discriminating and competitive UK marketplace and similarly imposes its US ideas in other European countries to little effect. The current offering feels very dated and not well suited to modern lifestyles. There is also a real problem with Platinum being a very expensive flagship product but offering very middle of the road benefits. In the US there are vast numbers of people who are proud to have a walletful of cards even if they make no financial sense and flashing a fancy card is seen as a status symbol which it generally isn’t here. I won’t think the coupon book principle works at all well in the UK and once you start having to add up all the bits you have lost a lot of potential customers.There’s a problem in advertising the Plat as the THE ultimate travel card when it’s actually the Gold card that offers good benefits for travellers. It’s ridiculous to have the most expensive card (ex Centurion) with the lowest MR offer and anecdotally, the worst offers.
Plat needs to smarten up the insurance product so as to stop excluding 1/3 of the population who have common pre-existing conditions and they need radically to improve some sections eg travel inconvenience. Beyond that they need to get some more upmarket and aspirational hotel groups on board. If they want to go down the credits route they need to give people more leeway on how they spend what is effectively their own money rather than tie them to HN and the Ivy.
The hire car benefits are so widely available as to be pointless and I think the hotel benefits (including FHR) are of minimal value and easily sourced elsewhere at more competitive prices.
PP/lounge access seems to be an issue and for many a bit useless. If the Platinum customer is supposed to be what Amex wants, then they are very likely to have lounge access from their airline ticket or status anyway. Independent lounge access is also now so widely available on so many cards or directly and the quality of those PP lounges so poor, it seems rather pointless. Amex could get round that by building more of its own lounges that are more at the premium end.
Other cards offer contemporary benefits like subscriptions, WeWork, brokerage or crypto accounts etc. Unfortunately Amex UK is starting in the wrong place and has shockingly poor management; they need to make some external appointments.
The total desperation with all these monumental SUBs followed by retention two months later is just so palpably embarrassing. The very amateur toying with split SUBs, removal of pro-rata refunds, then non implementation, failure to clarify whether dining / HN credits will run into 2025 is all just so laughably poor. The current management has also presided over a total collapse in customer service.
The BAPP is a successful product and the only one with a USP, something Amex likes to congratulate itself for but get somewhat coy when challenged that all the enhancements are in fact driven by BA and Avios.
We are now living in a different world. Show me one product / hotel status / credit card privilege that got better over time!
That’s the exact reason people like us are rather aggressive with these products. Fill it up before it is too late. Because all of us know that it will get worse. For the Plat, I am curious what they will do in 2025 when Harvey deal is over. Am I expecting anything better? No.
@can2 the other part of the problem Amex has is that merchants have wised up to all the marketing guff Amex uses to convince them to participate in offers of various types. Lots of fancy figures about bringing them high spending long term customers that will enhance their business rather than the reality that it’s like a seagull swooping in to steal someone’s chips; you probably won’t see them again.@can2 – I simply put ‘subscriptions’ because they probably need to offer a menu. Revolut has done a deal with the FT and for many that’s a great and genuine money saving benefit, but it could be on other papers or Apple News/TV, Netflix that are popular or gym memberships – whatever people value more than some grotty wine or mouldy food in a tired PP lounge! I suggested links with more upmarket hotel groups – if the target customer is a modern affluent one, many want a different type of hotel vs those big chains that drag things down with a reliance on brand rather than quality.
Obviously Amex needs to do proper market research and talk to its customers but they need to align an aspirational card with higher level products.
This is all very interesting reading, as a new points person here’s my view.
The Platinum card is surprisingly limited in areas I would expect it to be good for:
– foreign exchange fees, laughable that my free Monzo debit gets a better rate
– travel insurance, less flexible than what we get with Natwest Platinum account for £18 a month (and we get breakdown cover in that as well)
– points earning rate (sure MRs are “more valuable” than Avios thanks to the flexibility but 1.5x on BAPP vs 1 MR on Plat, now I’ve hit my 75K SUB target all our spending is back on a BAPP even though we’ve got its companion voucher)BUT quite reasonably priced when you factor in
– dining credit (if you can’t find yourself in a big city once a year and one abroad once a year is this the card for you anyway?), – HN credit (even if it’s an odd one and I can’t afford anything in that shop I’ll take £100 in gift cards and put them towards an afternoon tea or a starter in the restaurant … I joke, it’s not that expensive … I don’t think)
– Priority Pass (I assume access won’t be guaranteed but since I don’t have airline lounge access I’ll take it and find another way if I can’t get in on PP)
– Melia status … simply for the 3 x 20% discount each year, on a 7 – 10 day all inc hotel stay (yes, shocking I know, some of us like AI where we can switch off and think about nothing for a a week or so) that’s a £500+ saving, we have two London trip this year that it will be handy for.
– Avis status second driver free has saved us about £300 alone this year.Maybe it’s because I’m new to all this, or that I’m very solidly middle class and so not flying business/first for work or leisure but to me it seems like a decent enough offering for the fee … that being said there’s some, what I assume are legacy, benefits that I can’t justify using that I lump in to the “fancy w****r” category around all the fancy hotels and fancy brand statement credits.
The question Amex should ponder is if I’m the actual target demographic for this product? Or did they cobble together a product that annoys their real target demographic (let’s loosely say households on over £200K a year, I don’t know just picking a big sounding number here) but gives just enough benefit to the likes of me (who do not earn the above!!!) that we can see value but, overall weigh the product and org down?
FYI, I won’t be churning the card, the 75K tipped me over the edge but wasn’t the driving reason behind the card – see the above for that.
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