Disclaimer: All views are personal, with my experience of holding Amex Platinum Charge Card for 4 years in a row.
American Express India has recently announced that they’re hiking the joining/annual fee of the American Express Platinum Charge Card, which is the flagship product of the issuer. And in turn they’re not only adding new benefits, but also revoking some existing benefits on the card.
So are the changes positive? Absolutely not.
Here’s everything you need to know about the upcoming changes to Amex Platinum Charge Card that goes live eff. 8th Oct 2024.
New Benefits
Renewal benefit: 35,000 INR Voucher (Taj, Luxe, Postcard Hotels)
If you’re an existing Amex Platinum Cardholder, you would know that you would anyway get closer to 30K INR worth of benefits as a retention offer.
So this one doesn’t add any value, especially because the spend requirement is also kept unrealistically high.
While spending 20L may not be a problem for those holding the card, the concern is that the reward rate on the card is way too low compared to the competition.
Complimentary OTT memberships
I don’t know who on earth decided to provide Amazon Prime “lite” membership for a Plat Charge cardholder.
Seriously? It reminds me of this scene:
Avoiding all these unnecessary memberships and just giving Netflix Premium alone would have done a much better job.
Complimentary Hotel Memberships: Accor plus, Postcard Hotels, iPrefer
Accor Plus is definitely valuable, however one can get the same with Amex Reserve Credit Card or just by burning Accor points itself. So no point in adding overlapping benefits here. At-least they could have thought of adding 1/2 nights to it.
Also, having spoken to over 50+ Plat charge cardholders personally, I can say that most of them do not prefer Accor hotels.
Postcard Hotels Platinum tier is fine, except that most of their hotels are expensive and I feel it’s maybe of centurion standard, so no point in adding it to the platinum.
iPrefer Titanium is good, but again there are very few hotels under iPrefer, making it tough to get any value out of it.
Instead of these benefits, giving just Marriott Platinum membership alone would have made the card sell like hotcakes.
Benefits going away
While the changes on lounge access for supplementary cardholder is just fine, revoking birthday benefit / 10K Taj Voucher is certainly not.
So is Amex Plat worth 66K INR?
For most cardholders, these changes generally means 10K Taj voucher is going away and the fee gets a hike of 6K INR. That’s a 16K INR loss on an already expensive product.
So for most, this is a negative change.
I feel that whoever refreshed the benefits “failed” to understand the “UHNI” segment and added benefits just like anyone would do for a 5K fee “retail” card.
Such mistakes are common with newbies in the industry but it’s shocking to see it happen with American Express.
The changes are not of AMEX Standard in any way and even the email itself is not Amex Standard, as it’s misleading. For ex, the Apple/Lalit offers are short-term offers and it should not be on this email content body, even though the t&c has all info of them.
These changes going live simply means that Amex Plat Charge is heading towards a slow death. I wish Amex Global steps in to see what’s going wrong with Amex India.