AMEX BUSINESS PLATINUM RETENTION OFFER

I applied and was approved for a 100k AMEX Platinum Business card last November. Well the annual fee appeared on my statement so I thought today would be a good day to see what they could do to entice me to keep it.

I have always liked AMEX cards. I got my first Blue card when they were introduced 17 years ago and I was a college student drawn in by like 0% APR for 6 months. I still have that card today.

I called the number on the back of my AMEX Business Platinum Card, and after a automated questions, I was to the prompts for cancelling my card. I knew I wanted to talked to a customer service rep though. The automatic prompts asked me to confirm the last 5 digits of my card, and then it says to please confirm cancellation of my Delta AMEX card. I didn’t even realize my last 5 digits of both cards are the same. So I responded no and I get to a live CSR. It was about 3 minutes until I was to a live person. This CSR informs me he cant cancel a card and transfers me to another department. this took another 5 minutes.

The new CSR asks me why I want to cancel and I tell him because I don’t get enough value from the high annual fee. He reads off all the benefits that I am already aware of to try to get me to stay. I say to please cancel and then he offers a $100 statement credit or 10k points because I am such a valued customer… I ask him to get both, and he says no so I  respond to cancel just to see what his next step is. He reads off some disclosure stuff and asks me to confirm that I want to close the account. I then tell him that I will take the 10k points.

This has been a great card to me for the past year so that is why I decided to keep it. Besides the large signup bonus, I used the Centurion lounges and Delta lounges quite often. (Priority pass is nice as well, but I get that on other cards too.) Also, I had 3 large purchases over $5k last year and this gives you 1.5 points on those transaction. (this is also great for large monetary donations.) I have another one coming in in January as well. I also used several AMEX offers for either cash back or for some type of bonus points.

Plus I was targeted last year for a 50k bonus after spending $10k dollars.

If 2018 is as good as 2017 for this card, then I would probably keep it again going into 2019. If there are not as many bonus offers or good AMEX offers, I probably won’t keep it another year.