American Express Business Platinum Retention Offer
It was recently that time of year again. The time of year when I go to Amex with my hands out begging for them to give me a reason to continue to line their coffers with my hard earned cash. You know, the retention offer season. This time around I was kicking the tires looking for an American Express Business Platinum retention offer. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t close to good enough. To be honest, I don’t think most Amex Business Platinum retention offers are good enough these days.
Offer Details
Here are the details of my American Express Business Platinum retention offer. Remember that you can check recent data points for most major credit card retention offers in our database.
- Earn 10,000 Membership Rewards points that will be applied to your account after you spend a minimum of $5,000 on qualifying purchases on your card over a 92 day period.
If I had accepted the offer I would have had to keep the card open for at least 12 months from the date of acceptance. Not from the next annual fee posting – but from this date. That is a tricky part to Amex’s rules that catches people up. If I closed the card before 12 months is up then American Express would likely claw back the bonus points. I would have still been within the refund window next year though.
Why This American Express Business Platinum Retention Offer Was Not Good Enough
Getting 10,000 Membership Rewards points for $5,000 in spend is only an additional 2x per dollar of spend. Since the Amex Business Platinum earns 1x on most spend, that would only be 3x on the first $5,000 in spend. Not very compelling when Amex has other business cards that earn 4x on bonus spend regularly.
That means I would need to like the card enough to pay the almost $900 annual fee on merit alone. Well, I don’t. Especially not after their recent card refresh. The Business Platinum used to be the better of the two Platinum products long term (business and personal). At least in my opinion that is. With the refresh, they somehow made the card more expensive AND worse. Quite the feat to pull off there.
The biggest losses (for me) were dropping the Dell credit from $400 a year to $150. Yes, even as much as I hate Dell. It was fairly easy to get value from the credit if you could get an order through. The other one, and probably largest loss overall, was nerfing the 35% airline bonus and locking it into only your selected airline. The perk used to offer a great way to fly random business class products when the cash price was cheap. I am thinking of you Azores Airlines…
This doesn’t even include the fact that one of the bigger perks, the airline incidental credit, has become substantially less useful lately.
Being In Pop-Up Jail Gives Me A Different Perspective
I have been in the Amex pop-up jail for a very long time now. Even if I did bust out for a hot minute. Because of that I look at all American Express retention offers in a certain way. Can I get more from a referral offer than this retention offer?
Why? Because I could close the Amex Business Platinum and then have my wife refer me right back to the card. That would come with a 20,000 – 40,000 refer a friend bonus. If the retention offer isn’t at least in that realm then I am not considering it. I wouldn’t even have to do any spend with the referral offer either. There is a possibility to double / triple dip some perks this way too.
Amex Business Platinum Retention Offer: Final Thoughts
I was glad to see a retention offer on my Amex Business Platinum card because you are not always guaranteed to get one. That has always surprised me when you are talking about a $900 card, but it is what it is. Unfortunately, the offer wasn’t good enough for me to keep the card. The retention offer would have had to be at least as good as a refer a friend bonus for me to even consider it. Not even making it to that level is kind of wild when you think about it.
Let me know what your cutoff for retention offer consideration is down below, or in the MTM Facebook Group. Is it something similar to my refer a friend bonus bar?
I always love your honesty, mark. I too am in a predicament with my business card coming to the annual fee being due and I really want to keep it for the $300 fine Hotel twice it is something I really do use but none of those other credits honestly appeal to me I thought about the personal platinum, but I two of them pop-up jail but to your point, I guess P2 could refer me for 25K at least that’s something but I hate giving I hate getting a card and not getting a sign-up bonus. Any rate thanks for the article always good food for Thought
If in pop-up jail, and biz credits are not the best for you, then taking the referral for another personal Platinum could make sense. Especially if you can use the $400 in Resy credits. That plus the $600 in FHR puts you ahead of the annual fee, and everything else is just gravy. If you time it towards the end of June or December, where you can grab an extra perk or two for the timing – even better. You could also try to track down an NLL Biz Plat offer if you want the bonus. There are some links out there (I think DoC covered it), but they do come with some risk there.
” Yes, even as much as I hate Dell. ”
Is that what you meant to say?
What are we to make of an advisor and expert who has that attitude?
Yeah, I meant it. Have you ever had to deal with Dell customer service or them cancelling your orders and locking your account for doing nothing but trying to use these credits? Because I have – an thousands of other miles and points people have too. I want honesty above all else from my “advisors and experts”. Do you want something different? Do you want me to lie to you? Wild take here L3 that I guess I don’t get…
I had the exact same situation yesterday, same offer, and closed it for same reasons.
What I hadn’t considered was the firm bar set at the referral level, which would have made me think a little less about it.
I’d love to know how to get out of popup jail, even the supposed NLL links that float around are always “sorry this offer doesn’t apply to you”.
NLL is the only way for me. Some think spending a lot on co-branded Amex cards helps, but that hasn’t been the case for me the last half decade or so.
Either Amex is not offering upgrade bonuses to the Personal Platinum or Gold for the time being or they have become highly targeted to a relative handful of big spenders (unlike in the past when they offered at least 30K to Gold or 50K to Platinum). I think the point with these low retention offers (and I canceled a Bonvoy Biz and downgraded a Delta Reserve after getting very weak retention offers too), lack of upgrade offers, along with the “as high as” SUBs is that they are really trying to boot out maximizers now more that they can micro-target using technology to find the truly profitable customers.
I am sure technology is helping them a lot there if that is what they are doing these days.