American Express Customers Are Hoarding Miles and Points
American Express has been offering extra earning opportunities and big bonuses for its credit cards recently. At the same time, travel demand is way down compared to previous years, so redeeming those earned points has not been as easy, or tempting as usual.
That means that American Express customers who have co-brand travel cards or the popular Platinum, Gold and Green cards, have been stockpiling their points and miles during the pandemic. The information Chief Financial Officer Jeff Campbell who says that rewards are likely to be used eventually for big vacations.
Travel is obviously not the only option for redeeming points. American Express has expanded the redemption opportunities to let customers use points for many other purchases. They even offered up to 100% bonuses for redeeming points to cover purchases. But even that bonus would only get you a value of 1.2 cents per point, which is still far from the value you would get when redeeming for travel.
“They’re not choosing to redeem them for online retail, which they could,” Campbell said at a virtual conference Tuesday, as per Bloomberg. “They’re just stocking up the points to travel.”
But Campbell says that American Express will not change its way and will continue to focus on travel, even thought it has provided some temporary perks for customers who are staying home for now.
“We’d be crazy to dramatically pivot the whole company because of what we view as a fairly temporary change in the way people are going to spend,” he said. “The human urge to travel — to gather, to explore — is insatiable.”
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[…] h/t: Miles to Memories […]
Traveling around the world full time currently.
Haven’t slowed a bit. Goofing off in Europe and then four months in south and Central America. Next month.
Piled up 1.8M Amex pts in the last year or two, been burning them on biz class travel all year.
It’s so strange that people aren’t traveling now.
Stayed at hotels this weekend where fiancé and I were only guests.
*shrug*.
I’m spending my Amex points on travel right now, as fast as I can.
Yep. Hoarding.
Nah. I’m cashing them via Schwab as soon as they hit my account after payment posted.
I have more Amex MR in my account than I possibly have ever had, waiting for great transfer promos to come back.
Jonathan. What exactly do you think is BS?
Amex is also offering great retention bonuses. I am going through all my cards and if they wont offer a good retention bonus I am cancelling. But Amazon clearly wants my business so…
i meant Amex clearly wants my business lol.
Thats complete BS, maybe if they offer better rewards then ppl would redeem their amex points. I’ll give you a great example. Alaska airlines lets you redeem credit for $.01 and everyone and their mothers took advantage of that. Southwest offered to redeem at $.012 a worse rate and not everyone took advantage of that. If you truly want ppl to use their miles then offer better redemptions but thats not going to happen. Axp is up over $100/share and the company is doing very well. It’s kinda funny too, amex is doing so well you would think they offer better redemptions to try to get new clients but they dont see it that way.