3 Reasons Why I applied for Amex Platinum amidst
As you might know, I recently upgraded my AMEX Gold charge to Amex platinum by June 2020.
If you’re new to Amex platinum, let me tell you that it’s not a typical rewards credit card but its a card for those who do a lot of travel, especially international travel and do good chunk of luxury spends.
I don’t do either of them as much as it demands, for ex, I did not even make a single international trip
There must a reason isn’t it? Well there are 3 strong reasons why I got this expensive metal card. Here you go!
1. Better Amex Offers
If you’ve noticed the trend, you might be aware that Amex have started sending better offers, in-fact “separate” version of the offers to plat charge cards compared to other Amex Cards.
Overall they always get better offers and it makes sense, as its priced at about 10X more than the usual ones.
2. Covid-19 Special offers
Amex India has been heavily affected compared to other issuers, probably due to high # of travel profiles. They lost over 75% of the transaction volume during the lockdown.
As this card is primarily used for travel benefits and as that is now being heavily affected, Amex has come up with some aggressive offers to add value to customers for the fee paid.
Here are some of the current offers on Amex platinum:
- Double Rewards on Earn And Burn
- 100% Cashback upto 18000
- Get upto 15000 bonus points on uility spends
All of these offers are highly lucrative. Double rewards especially is a great offer at this time, more about that later.
3. Better Concierge
American Express India Do Anything Platinum Concierge works round the clock all through the year, yet it used to be pretty bad in the past (2019 and before) as reported by many and my experience did not differ much either when I used to use the Supp. Card.
But after sending over 20+ requests in last 3 months in 2020, I can say that it has become a LOT better.
It definitely saves a lot of time for me as I frequently use them to get things done, which otherwise would take me extra 10-30 mins per request if I do it all by myself.
The Cost
Whatsoever the offers be, you might ask, “Its still 60K+GST. That’s a lot isn’t it?”.
Well, the joining fee of Rs.60K+GST (70K) gives you 100k points as welcome bonus. This welcome bonus gets credited as soon as you spend the 50K INR (instead of 90K as it used to be).
You don’t need to wait for next billing cycle to use the points either. So the double rewards offer if used right simply slashes the fee from 70K to nice 20K.
Further, if you use the referal link you save another 5K, thereby making the net joining fee to 15K INR.
Yes, you can get better point value by redeeming points for Marriott just as I used to get anywhere from Rs.1 to Rs.3 per point.
But by redeeming points for cash it helps us to reduce the out of pocket expense, especially in tough times like this. So why not?
