Retention offer booboo? Did I make a mistake?

[Pointsamateur]

My Bapp was coming up for renewal in April, and now my wife has one (got the referral), we don’t need to pay 2 annual fees. SO I used online chat to cancel it, and they were wonderfully efficient. Did try to get me to talk to retentions, but I said no as I just wanted to cancel. Keen to get my 2 year wait started quickly.

Now I wonder what I might have missed. So thought I would ask for other’s experiences. I expect they would have offered me a number of avios to continue on, and I would have let it renew and paid the annual fee. But would the retention offer have been on a minimum spend, like sign up bonuses ? If not then I made a mistake, as I could have taken the retention avios offer, and cancelled a month or 2 later for a pro rate refund of the annual fee, surely ?

[DJ]

For BAPP, a typical retention would be spend £3000 in three months to get 10K Avios bonus. I had that and then downgraded my card to the fee free one.

[NorthernLass]

OH got 10k avios a few months ago to retain card with no strings attached – before the usual suspects chip in, it’s the first and only time he has asked in 12 years of continually holding the card and he’d genuinely been considering cancelling as I recently got a new BAPP myself! So I think it does depend. In the end we decided to hang on to it as Amex seem to be tightening up a lot on new and re-applications just now, and the new-style 241s are much better now they give access to IB flights.

*This doesn’t help OP, of course, but I would say that 10k avios wouldn’t have persuaded us to hang onto the card in the long term as the fee would soon cancel that out.

[RK228]

I got the spend £3000 get 10,000 Avios when I went to cancel last year. I kept the card for a bit after triggering this, but then called to cancel in late October.

They offered to downgrade me to the free card, which I took because my wife previously got a double-points retention offer for three months when she went to cancel her free card last year and I wanted to have one Amex card until we completed our Barcelona trip with BA last November.

I wasn’t sure if I’d get that offer, but when I called to genuinely cancel last month, they did offer me the double points. That has coincided with our redecorating a few rooms in the house, so making out well in that regard very quickly. It is making me think though that I’m going to need to upgrade back to BAPP as nearing £10,000 threshold for voucher. I don’t know if Amex will allow this, although I guess this was probably the point of their retention offers. If they hadn’t been offered, I would have cancelled each time and instead I’ve put quite a bit of spend through Amex unexpectedly.

[Harrods]

£1k spend for 5k points is the offer rn.

[Pointsamateur]

Thanks everyone.

[Joe G]

I just had a similar experience, I’ve had the BAPP for 5 years and always paid the fee for the the full year each year without any downgrade/upgrade shenanigans but this year after a few recent high value redemptions I didn’t think I’d have enough avios in the pot to effectively utilise my companion voucher so contacted chat to cancel just after my renewal year ended.

I hadn’t been after any sort of retention offer but at the same time I was sort of surprised they didn’t seem tremendously bothered to try and stop me from cancelling or offer any sort of retention, they just cancelled the card in a matter of minutes without any effort made to try and get me to keep it.

[Luca M]

Once a year, spend £3k get 10,000 Avios. It is not great but if you make genuine use of it, the 1.5 Avios per £1 spent (and 3 Avios per £1 spent at BA) plus the 2-4-1 voucher, it is not too bad