Amex Hilton Retention Offer
Retention offers are a great way to rack up extra points, cash back or get a break on a card’s annual fee. The offers are especially profitable when it is for a card you want to keep anyway. That is how it worked out with my Blue Business Plus last year. I was shocked to get an offer at all on the card, much less one so valuable, for a card with no annual fee. It has happened again! I was offered a Amex Hilton retention offer, a card with no annual fee.
Background On Why I Wanted To Close The Amex Hilton Card
A few days ago I shared my American Express plan for the first half of 2022. In that article I discussed how I planned on racking up a pile of Membership Rewards points and cash back, all without earning a welcome offer. Check out the article if you missed it earlier this week.
A part of that plan was freeing up some American Express credit card slots, because of their application rules and credit card limitations. That plan to open up slots included closing my Amex Hilton card. I had held onto the card for a few years now waiting for an upgrade offer to the Surpass or Aspire card. This would have been my third time doing such an offer. After two years I have given up hope and I am ready to move on. Plus that slot is just too valuable at this point for me to continue to wait.
Amex Hilton Retention Offer Details
I reached out to Amex to close my Amex Hilton card via chat. After chatting with the front line rep for a few seconds I was connected with a membership specialist. That rep came on and asked me a few questions about my closure. They then asked if I would be interested in a retention offer on the card and I said sure, it never hurts to listen. I love the fact that we can get retention offers via Amex Chat now by the way, a silver lining of the pandemic for sure.
The terms of the retention offer:
- I would have to agree to keep the card for another 12 months
- The offer would be for an additional 20,000 Hilton Honor points
- I would need to spend $3,000 over the next 3 months
I would label this as a fairly decent retention offer. It could actually be considered better than decent retention offer since it is for a card with no annual fee. It isn’t as good as some other data points we have for 10,000 or 20,000 points with no spending required on our retention offer database.
The 20,000 Hilton Honors points are worth at least $90 to me. That is a return 3% on the next $3000 in spend and that does not include the points I would earn normally from the purchases. If I focused it on the grocery category that would net me a total of 35,000 points for $3,000 in spend, not too shabby.
Why I Turned It Down
I am not going to lie, I was tempted to take the offer. The fact that my Amex Hilton retention offer was on a card with no annual fee seems too good to be true. And, simply because of that I hated passing it up. If I had extra credit card slots already I probably would have. That slot is just too valuable to me right now and I needed it to move forward with my plan, so I closed the account.
Final Thoughts
If you have an Amex Hilton card I would fire up Amex chat and see if you can get an offer on your account. Especially if you planned on keeping it anyway. It never hurts to ask, you can always back down from the closure if nothing is offered.
I think 20,000 Hilton Honors points is a good offer. Heck, it is more than I got for my old Aspire card, before I closed it that is. If I didn’t need the credit card slot opened I would have taken offer and kept it open and pined away for an upgrade offer once again.
Be sure to check out our massive retention offer database for all of the most recent data points. Bookmark it so you can check back before every retention call you make to see what offers are currently available.
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What do you mean by “credit card slot”? Is there a limit on how many Amex cards you can have at once?
Yes there is a limit to how many credit cards you can have.
https://milestomemories.com/american-express-credit-card-limit-increased/
Also one for non credit cards
https://milestomemories.com/amex-limits-charge-cards/
I can’t product change on a retention offer either, correct? Thx
You can not close a card for 12 months with a retention offer. A product change is a bit murkier. I think if it was an upgrade you would probably be okay, downgrade would be risky. Probably best to hold it for 12 months.