Donate to Remove ads

Got a credit card? use our Credit Card & Finance Calculators

Thanks to johnstevens77,Bhoddhisatva,scotia,Anonymous,Cornytiv34, for Donating to support the site

Booking tickets via Amex travel with a UK platinum card

Holiday Ideas & Foreign Travel
Julian
Lemon Quarter
Posts: 1385
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 9:58 am
Has thanked: 532 times
Been thanked: 676 times

Booking tickets via Amex travel with a UK platinum card

#493030

Postby Julian » April 9th, 2022, 11:26 am

I currently have a gold UK Amex charge card that I love, the benefits are great, but I am considering upgrading to a Platinum card for one reason only and that is the “International Airline Program” - https://www.americanexpress.com/en-gb/t ... e-program/ - that claims to be able to get up to 20% off fares in premium cabins on selected airlines if booked via Amex travel or the platinum concierge service. Those selected airlines include all of the ones that I would be likely to use but my concern is whether this “up to 20% off” is anything akin to those “fly to New York for £100 return” offer where it turns out that there are only 2 tickets available at that price so essentially the offer is unredeemable unless one is amazingly quick/lucky.

If I did switch to a platinum card I would actually earn rewards points at a lower rate than I currently do on my gold card (which seems a bit odd to me) and my annual fee would go up by about £350 a year (ouch!) but with my typical annual travel spend even a 10% saving on tickets based on what I pay now would recoup that about four times over which more than compensates for the lower rewards points rates and there are some other perks that would be of value to me such as annual travel insurance that covers trips of up to 90 days.

So my question is - are there any holders of a UK platinum Amex charge card (in my case it would be a personal not a business card but I’m not sure that would affect the way the discounted fares perk behaves) who have booked tickets (ideally first class long haul, even better if it’s on Emirates) and if so did you find that non-trivially discounted fares were fairly readily available?

When I get back to the UK in a few weeks I’m going to call Amex and see if they would run some platinum-priced airfare searches for me, or what my options would be for having both a gold and a platinum card for a couple of weeks so that I could get pricing myself and if those platinum discounts did turn out to be rare as hens teeth that I could cancel the Platinum card with no or minimum penalty without compromising my gold card status in any way, but in the meantime I would be very interested in hearing any first hand experiences of how useful this perk is in practice.

- Julian

P.S. I did consider whether I should post my question here or in the credit cards and loans forum but since my question is entirely about airfares this seemed the most appropriate place.

Lootman
The full Lemon
Posts: 18674
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 3:58 pm
Has thanked: 628 times
Been thanked: 6559 times

Re: Booking tickets via Amex travel with a UK platinum card

#493066

Postby Lootman » April 9th, 2022, 1:01 pm

This article is from the US but the experience of the writer was that the discount was only on some airlines are not always as much as 20%:

https://thepointsguy.com/news/amex-domestic-discount/

I dislike buying travel through credit card portals as it places an intermediary between you and the airline or hotel, which can be a problem if things need to change. That said Amex are pretty good in that regard. But also for hotels it can mean you don't get loyalty points or status for your stay.

I have looked at the Amex Platinum card a couple of times, but have never pulled the trigger. I am happy to pay an annual fee for a credit card with good travel benefits. But I have never been able to justify the huge annual fee on the Amex Platinum.

The commissions for portals booking travel are quite substantial so it is possible that what Amex is really doing here is rebating you some of that commission.

Julian
Lemon Quarter
Posts: 1385
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 9:58 am
Has thanked: 532 times
Been thanked: 676 times

Re: Booking tickets via Amex travel with a UK platinum card

#493081

Postby Julian » April 9th, 2022, 2:45 pm

Lootman wrote:This article is from the US but the experience of the writer was that the discount was only on some airlines are not always as much as 20%:

https://thepointsguy.com/news/amex-domestic-discount/

I dislike buying travel through credit card portals as it places an intermediary between you and the airline or hotel, which can be a problem if things need to change. That said Amex are pretty good in that regard. But also for hotels it can mean you don't get loyalty points or status for your stay.

I have looked at the Amex Platinum card a couple of times, but have never pulled the trigger. I am happy to pay an annual fee for a credit card with good travel benefits. But I have never been able to justify the huge annual fee on the Amex Platinum.

The commissions for portals booking travel are quite substantial so it is possible that what Amex is really doing here is rebating you some of that commission.

Thanks Lootman, that’s a useful link. Most of his examples seem to show a 10% to !5% saving and he didn’t mention having to run loads of searches to find dates with discounted flights which I assume he would have done if availability was restricted to very few flights. I do hope that experience is indicative of the UK program.

Exactly like you “I have looked at the Amex Platinum card a couple of times, but have never pulled the trigger. I am happy to pay an annual fee for a credit card with good travel benefits. But I have never been able to justify the huge annual fee on the Amex Platinum”. It really is entirely down to my recently discovering(*) this discounted airfare perk on the UK cards that potentially changes the equation for me potentially compellingly in favour of the platinum card. The potential benefit is, currently at least, amplified by the steep increases in ticket prices that I have been seeing vs the prices I was paying pre-pandemic. Pre-pandemic I didn’t have any difficulty getting a first class return on Emirates from London to Cape Town peak season for about £4,500 with optimal connection times. Currently the price is about £6,900 for the same flights so just over a 50% increase! At those prices a 10% saving on a single return ticket recoups the £595 annual Amex fee with change to spare.

I’ll try to remember to update this thread in May by which time I hope I will have been able to make my own determination, assuming Amex will accept me, but the Amex pre-application credit checker says that it’s ”highly likely” that I’ll be accepted so I assume that I’ll be OK if I do decide to go ahead.

- Julian

(*) I wonder if that is because I’d never spotted it in the blurb before or if it has only been added to the list of UK card benefits fairly recently.

Lootman
The full Lemon
Posts: 18674
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 3:58 pm
Has thanked: 628 times
Been thanked: 6559 times

Re: Booking tickets via Amex travel with a UK platinum card

#493084

Postby Lootman » April 9th, 2022, 2:59 pm

Julian wrote:The potential benefit is, currently at least, amplified by the steep increases in ticket prices that I have been seeing vs the prices I was paying pre-pandemic. Pre-pandemic I didn’t have any difficulty getting a first class return on Emirates from London to Cape Town peak season for about £4,500 with optimal connection times. Currently the price is about £6,900 for the same flights so just over a 50% increase! At those prices a 10% saving on a single return ticket recoups the £595 annual Amex fee with change to spare.

Air fares have started to get silly recently. I attribute that to the sudden explosion in demand for travel along with supply still being constrained due to cutbacks by airlines and airports. Then there is the large spike in oil prices.

For first class fares another problem is that there are fewer seats now, due to airlines mothballing or retiring the large 4-engined widebodies that typically have more F seats. Maybe not such an issue with Emirates and all their A380's, but BA flights that used to have 14 seats in F may now only have 6 or 8. That also makes it harder to redeem all those points and miles you have probably accumulated. Finding an Avios redemption to the US in F has become near impossible, whilst the cash prices for F are jacked up.

PS: Take a look at the cash prices of long-haul premium-cabin flights out of Stockholm airport (ARN). For some reason they seem to be a lot cheaper, and of course no UK APT.


Return to “Airport Lounge”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 11 guests