American Express Pay Over Time Issues
American Express released a new round of pay over time offers yesterday. I have always been a fan of these offers because they are (free!) easy points. All you need to do is agree to activate pay over time on your card and you earn 20,000 or 30,000 Membership Rewards points. The problem is you need to be targeted for the offer. The good news is it seems like a lot of people were targeted yesterday, including my wife.
I have to admit I was pretty excited to see this hit the inbox. It has been a few years since we received an offer so I clicked through to activate it lickity split. The problem was we kept getting an error message after hitting the accept button.
I figured it was a glitch or browser issue but there were other reports of having a problem in our Facebook Group as well. That is when we fired up Amex Chat to see if they could help. The chat rep informed us that they don’t have access to these targeted offers and that a phone call was needed. Ugh, more wife points I needed to burn. Now it seems like the entire Amex system is down this morning.
My wife called the number on the back of her card and told them the issues we were seeing online. The rep was able to activate the offer and told her the 20,000 Membership Rewards points should be in her account before her next statement cuts. Fingers crossed it works out that way and I don’t need to make her call again.
For whatever reason a lot of people had issues with the latest round of pay over time offers. If you were getting an error online then call the number on the back of your card and they should be able to help get it set up and add the points to your account. Just remember that you may want to turn pay over time back off a little ways down the road. It can sometimes cause a card to count towards Amex’s 5 credit card limit. I am likely going to wait a month or two to do it.
Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card
Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card is the old king of travel rewards cards. Right now
bonus_miles_full
Learn more about this card and its features!
Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities.
In order to get a Pay Over Time offer, do you need to have Pay Over Time set to Inactive?
It needs to be turned off yeah
I never see these.
I’m having a different issue. Email offer on 2 cards shows 30k for activating pay over time. But on both accounts the offer is only 20k when I click through. Planning to call today if issue hasn’t fixed itself.
Heard a lot of that too. Amex site seems to finally be back up and running
Just called and they told me they are doing a system update right now. They said I should try again in the next 24-48 hours. Rep said that since it is a direct offer I should wait and do it myself on the computer because if he did it over the phone it would not get me the points since he didn’t have access to the email offer I received. Not sure if he’s right but thought I’d report.
Thanks Jeff
Wife called in on March 31st and the points just posted this morning so calling in should work fine.