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The American Express Enhanced Business Platinum 50% pay-with-points rebate has quickly become one of our favorite benefits. Unfortunately, it seems this benefit became everyone’s favorite — and therefore it has become too expensive for Amex to continue to offer it. As reported by The Points Guy, Amex has announced that effective June 1st, they will be decreasing the pay-with-points rebate to 35%. Additionally, there will now be a cap of 500,000 rebated points per year. Furthermore, rebate processing time has increased from a couple of days to 6-10 weeks.
Summary of Changes
- Business Platinum pay-with-points rebate decreasing from 50% to 35%
- Annual cap of 500,000 rebated points
- Rebate processing time has increased to 6-10 weeks
Quick Thoughts
This drops the effective per-point value to 1.54 cents per point. While that is still marginally better than using points with the Chase Sapphire Reserve or the forthcoming US Bank Altitude Reserve, those cards are much less restrictive in that you can use Ultimate Rewards or US Bank points to pay for any flight or hotel. As far as we know, Amex has no plans to expand the current benefit, which applies to all business and first class flights, but only your chosen domestic airline for coach fares.
Additionally, the pay-with-points rebate requires you to have more points up front in order to make a redemption. For example, a $1,000 airfare will require you to have 100,000 points initially. You will receive 35% back (35,000 points) for a net cost of 65,000 points. You’ll pay a bit more with Chase or US Bank — 66,667 points in total — but you won’t need to have 100K in your account in order to buy the ticket.
There is no doubt that this change is a disappointment. For Amex to pull the benefit less than a year after launching it, it must have been proving far more costly than anticipated. If you have any pay-with-points uses on your radar, make sure to take advantage of them before June 1st.
H/T: The Points Guy
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Well, I got one in the bag with the Oslo to New York via Lisbon, Business Class for 21,894 MR points each. Fantastic deal.
Thanks.
Now that it’s taking much longer for the 50% rebate, what happens if I need to legitimately cancel a booking within 24 hours, before the rebate posts? I end up essentially redeeming the MR for 1 cent each?
When you cancel, you can request that the points be redeposited into your account, rather than returned to you as cash.
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Well that blows. The Amex BP card was going to be a permanent fixture. Now I will have to reevaluate it now. I wish they would have just placed a cap let’s say 500k points per year. Just when I was loving this card: annual travel credit, 5x points on amextravel.com, and Gold status at Marriott & Friends, Hilton. Combo this w/ the Amex EveryDay was a great strategy for family travel.
I find it’s very tough to get a good deal on award travel while school is out. So this was a great alternative.
Major disappointment . Have redeemed about 300K this year (net 150K) . Guess I can stop focusing on MR points going forward
Thanks AmEx for continually making it easier and easier to cancel my platinum card as soon as the annual fee comes due. I just burned all my AmEx points on the 30% bonus to Virgin Atlantic for an ANA first redemption. Clearly their card benefits department is being run by very old and out of touch clowns. AmEx used to be the prestigious card carrier. Now only those who don’t follow points/miles think so. Chase and even Citi blow them out of the water on card benefits and now for a lower annual fee.