More crap Amex customer service

[BJ]

Agree with Anna, JDB and others that 20k is generous. Personally I’d be over the moon with it! Let’s face it, it is simple to recoup the annual fee on Gold and come out ahead on offers and bonus points so the fee is a bit of a non-issue if the card is used wisely. I agree that CS can be frustrating at times and it has become more so with the overseas call centre and chat but this has always been the case at amex, just have to be patient, go with the flow and even call back again if need be. Don’t see anything here that was worth getting so hot and bothered about, don’t sweat the small stuff as Americans say.

[NorthernLass]

I can’t understand how the OP doesn’t know about the 10k bonus avios if he’s had the gold card 3 years and spent £72k.
Also, I think cruise ships have wifi these days so perfectly possible to cancel on a specific day by chat or phone. I regularly book award flights if I am on holiday at T-355 and it’s minimal effort to take 30-60 minutes out of the day to do something like this.
I have noticed that even though my gold 12 month anniversary hit this month and my 10k bonus points have posted, I haven’t yet been charged the new fee. I’ve still got offers to use so not planning to cancel just yet but OP might find the same thing in his case. I still have a few offers to use then I’ll decide whether the new fee and benefits make the gold card worth holding on to.

[Lady London]

@paul-uk I never assumed you would take the 20 000 points. Thwre was nothing in your posts indicating you wanted to do anything other than ensure the card was cancelled on a date you wished it to be cancelled and to set this up ahead of time.

As it turns out you were in the same position with Amec as I was with Three and no it does not make sense.

However even though other posters said it indirectly, @Froggee’s post has triggered me to remind you that points are often credited late and you will not get any earned points that are not credited before you close the card. For years everyone on here advises this so if you will have any still in the pipeline by your close date you would be most unwise to close till they have come through. @Froggee has pointed out making sure of this will cost you £12 per month. Though unusually for Froggee he was rather waspish – perhaps our amphibian has swallowed a fly that went down the wrong way today 🙂

[pbcold]

This thread is hilarious, thank you paul.

[Pangolin]

if 20K points offer is ‘paltry’, what does that make my offer of 5k for £3k spend in 3 months?

[Benilyn]

paul-uk wrote:

I can cancel in advance of that date, but lose the period I’ve already paid for and the points I’ve accumulated (unless I move them first).

If you cancel earlier, you get a pro rata refund for days not used to the end of the year. So you don’t lose the period after the refund

[NorthernLass]

Pangolin wrote:

if 20K points offer is ‘paltry’, what does that make my offer of 5k for £3k spend in 3 months?

My OH got 10k bonus avios for £3k spend on the BAPP he’s held continuously for 11 years!

[VerdantBacon]

This is very amusing..

“AMEX FORCE ME TO CALL ON A CERTAIN DATE TO CANCEL!!”
– You can cancel any time and you will get a pro rata refund down to the date you cancel, in fact if you feel this much hatred, cancel today and get a refund

“I WILL LOSE MY HARD EARNED POINTS WHEN I CANCEL”
– Move you points before you cancel, not sure where you expect points to go when you don’t have an account anymore

“I HAD TO GO THROUGH NUMEROUS CUSTOMER SERVICE AGENTS AND A MANAGER BECAUSE I DIDNT KNOW WHAT I WANTED”
– Not their fault that you called to try beg for a large retention bonus because you spent a few quid on the card. If you actually wanted to cancel you would’ve already transferred your points out in preparation for cancellation

Have a day off mate

[TGLoyalty]

Nothing in the original post sounds like bad customer service to me. Either troll or extremely badly researched on OPs behalf

Should have taken the very generous 20k offer too

[SteveJ]

All in all a waste of a thread. Cancel whenever, get a pro rata refund. Nothing to see here, move on.

[Froggee]

Lady London wrote:

@paul-uk Though unusually for Froggee he was rather waspish – perhaps our amphibian has swallowed a fly that went down the wrong way today 🙂

Nah – I just totally and utterly couldn’t believe the thread but thought, hey sometimes people choose their words poorly on the interweb so I ignored the first effort. But nope, several further posts show that the words were reflective of the sentiment. You’ll note it’s not just I, Froggee who seems to think there is a disconnect between reasonable expectations and those of the OP.

But there is more than enough vitriol (to use le mot du jour) on the interweb so I’ll just apologise unreservedly. “If you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all” as my dear old ma taught me. Along with “better out than in”, it is one of her wisest apophthegms.

[JDB]

@Froggee I thought it was more than a little cheeky of LL to suggest our resident Prose Laureate was being “waspish” when I think she must have intended to say you were bang on the money. I fear LL read this thread as a customer service issue when it was in fact a customer issue, as most have spotted.

[Lady London]

No JDB I didn’t read the thread as a customer service issue – more as a company-with-poor-policies issue. For that I don’t blame customer service. In fact I hadn’t really noticed the thread heading.

Nor did I blame the poster either. He shared my own bemusement at the unfair refusal and my own feeling that this could do with a legal challenge for customer fairness.

I dom’t have a view of whether 20,000MR was a little or a lot because I don’t run an Amex anymore and the poster seemed as though the only thing he wanted from Amex was for them to allow him to organise his life by setting up the closure of his card on his.desired date. It struck me as commercially exploitative of Amex to refuse this. I had the same experience with Three and the poster’s experience with Amex chimed with this.

Not sure why anyone would think the OP was gonna take the offer of 20,000MR and cancel anyway. As if that was his plan, why would he have advised Amex at this early time of his wish to cancel.

[paul-uk]

Lady London wrote:

No JDB I didn’t read the thread as a customer service issue – more as a company-with-poor-policies issue. For that I don’t blame customer service. In fact I hadn’t really noticed the thread heading.

Nor did I blame the poster either. He shared my own bemusement at the unfair refusal and my own feeling that this could do with a legal challenge for customer fairness.

I dom’t have a view of whether 20,000MR was a little or a lot because I don’t run an Amex anymore and the poster seemed as though the only thing he wanted from Amex was for them to allow him to organise his life by setting up the closure of his card on his.desired date. It struck me as commercially exploitative of Amex to refuse this. I had the same experience with Three and the poster’s experience with Amex chimed with this.

Not sure why anyone would think the OP was gonna take the offer of 20,000MR and cancel anyway. As if that was his plan, why would he have advised Amex at this early time of his wish to cancel.

I would sincerely like to thank you for laying it out far better than I perhaps did.

You have it exactly 100% !!!

I dont follow the ins and outs of cards, deak, bonuses etc like most on here.

My experience and expectation is purely based on what I want to do ie ask about renewal bonus, make my iwn decision and then plan for cancellation.

It really isnt and shouldn’t be complicated.

Many of the posters are so involved in the intricacies of these cards, you fail to acknowledge a very simple request.

I do thank LL but feel this website so aggressive that i will move on (no I wont let the door catch me on the way out lol)

[Froggee]

Ah stuff it. I’ll say what needs to be said.

This site is full of kind, helpful people who frequently go out of their way to assist others and has less aggression than anywhere else on the interweb I have inhabited since MSN chat rooms were closed in 2003 and with it the friendly quiz room I loved so much.

The title of the thread and the entitled tone of your posts down to the use of block capitals to emphasise your outrage is what has led to the vitriol and aggression (as you describe it).

I think it has been a very measured response really.

If you’d calmly asked why it wasn’t possible for you to give pre-notice of your wish to cancel you would have received a gentle response. Instead you had a good old rant with increasingly flailing verbiage. Having failed to read the room you then started to dig deeper. A selection of the most frequent and most helpful posters have collectively gone WTF and with the exception of @LadyLondon, who has the patience of an angel on tranquillisers, have dismissed your vexation at Amex as being crazy nuts.

After a suitable cooling off period, you have now come back playing the victim albeit in what I’d consider your most reasonable post by a country mile – and that includes the final asinine sentence.

So farewell, good luck, safe travails and all that.

Froggee

[Andrew J]

Is this thread a windup?! I’m aghast that the OP expected more than 20k MR retention bonus from the entry-level Gold card.

[Carlos]

upgrade to platinum and show off your metal card on the cruise, you still have time and you know you want to!

[Peter K]

Andrew J wrote:

Is this thread a windup?! I’m aghast that the OP expected more than 20k MR retention bonus from the entry-level Gold card.

I think it might be. Actually, I hope it is. Or it’s a troll as previously mentioned. Certainly the OP’s claims of what he wants, expects, chatted with Amex about etc has varied wildly over the course of the thread.

Some unusual things I’ve spotted:

His apparent massive concern that he’ll have to pay an extra £12 monthly fee when he has 2 cruises lined up is strange to say the least.

His not wanting to cancel the card “early” and lose the benefits for the next 3 weeks, when he’ll mostly be on a cruise and typically only paying for drinks, not other large purchases. Not online purchases either in his mind, as if he had wifi to buy he could it to chat to Amex to cancel his card in a few minutes.

His “I dont follow the ins and outs of cards, deak, bonuses etc like most on here”, but the thread heading using the word “more” suggests he knows about previous claims of Amex being rubbish on here, meaning he reads the threads at least in passing enough to know more than he says he does.

His lack of knowledge about a 10k bonus points for spending £15k in a year, that he must have received in the past if what he says about time holding the gold card and spend level is correct, but knowing *to the day* 2yrs down the line when the yearly fee will be charged.

There’s probably more but I can’t be bothered to check.

A windup is hopefully what it is. Maybe hoping we all go “20k retention for gold, I never got that/I’ll try to get that” but it backfired? He hasn’t been looking for help, that one thing at least appears certain.

[Lady London]

Carlos, was that “Don’t bang tbe door on tbe way out” 🙂 ? You lot are very naughty.

I am afraid in the same situation I’d have been the same as the OP (without the block capitals). I suppose the roughness of the interweb reflects the nastiness of life today…And I know this is quite a gentle place really, relatively, so this saddens me.

Even Froggee’s mother’s “If you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all” has got chucked just for once today and we have the wonderful prose version of a @TGLoyalty-like “Tell it like it is” from Froggee above. However according to @Froggee paterfamilias previous reports, at least the practice of “Better out than in” has got passed down the generations (Kermit).

[Andrew J]

Peter K wrote:

Andrew J wrote:

Is this thread a windup?! I’m aghast that the OP expected more than 20k MR retention bonus from the entry-level Gold card.

I think it might be. Actually, I hope it is. Or it’s a troll as previously mentioned. Certainly the OP’s claims of what he wants, expects, chatted with Amex about etc has varied wildly over the course of the thread.

Some unusual things I’ve spotted:

His apparent massive concern that he’ll have to pay an extra £12 monthly fee when he has 2 cruises lined up is strange to say the least.

His not wanting to cancel the card “early” and lose the benefits for the next 3 weeks, when he’ll mostly be on a cruise and typically only paying for drinks, not other large purchases. Not online purchases either in his mind, as if he had wifi to buy he could it to chat to Amex to cancel his card in a few minutes.

His “I dont follow the ins and outs of cards, deak, bonuses etc like most on here”, but the thread heading using the word “more” suggests he knows about previous claims of Amex being rubbish on here, meaning he reads the threads at least in passing enough to know more than he says he does.

His lack of knowledge about a 10k bonus points for spending £15k in a year, that he must have received in the past if what he says about time holding the gold card and spend level is correct, but knowing *to the day* 2yrs down the line when the yearly fee will be charged.

There’s probably more but I can’t be bothered to check.

A windup is hopefully what it is. Maybe hoping we all go “20k retention for gold, I never got that/I’ll try to get that” but it backfired? He hasn’t been looking for help, that one thing at least appears certain.

Yes I think maybe it was just a very bored person on a Sunday afternoon wanting a reaction.

[eppleby]

paul-uk wrote:

It wasn’t so much the points issue – that’s their choice and my choice follows from it.

Its the fact that I’ve had to spend ONE HOUR in chat with them – after I was disconnected above, I stayed and a new “advisor” came along.

In one hour I got transferred FOUR times, cut off twice and struggled to raise a complaint about the cancellation process.

They EXPECT customer to call on the last day of the “contract” to cancel – it is impossible to advise them in advance; unless you wish to cancel there and then and lose the perks already paid for (and those accumulated).
Try theDaily Mail subscription – they don’t let you cancel in advance and will only cancel if you telephone! Obviously they think that they can persuade you to renew your subscription and no offer of a bonus!

That is an unfair contract term – and can only be in place as they know so many will miss that deadline and they earn renewal fees etc

I am not aware of any other industry which bans customers from notifying them they do not wish to renew a product or service.

And on the points issue, I spent £72,000 on the card over the last 2 years, so expected more. Obviously I will get it with the Virgin+ Card but their customer service is even worse lol

[Gary_Dexter]

20,000 points is generous, considering they could offer zero

[Robm]

Main complaint seems to be that Amex won’t cancel the card on a requested future date. This isn’t how any fee paying credit cards I know of work.

I understand that you can do this for things like UberEats – say you don’t want to renew, you cancel in advance, use up the last of your subscription, and it won’t charge you again. You don’t have to cancel them on the day the subscription ends.

As others have said, Amex are very generous with the pro rata refund. It is a bit annoying having to dip into the next year to get the points for spend in the current year – but I’ve found this pretty easy to understand. If you weren’t forced to go into a new year and clear out your points/ wait for bonus points – Amex might not be able to justify giving the same volume of bonus points

As others have also said, with Amex there is normally a delay on the fee being charged which means you can sometimes get away with not paying anything – not always the case though.

Chat can be hit or miss but an hour doesn’t sound too bad when you were asking them to do something which they do not offer (setting a date in the future for your card to be cancelled). You also got offered a great retention bonus.

This thread has given me a good laugh.