New Gold Card Member, but wrong version and no bonus.

Hey everyone, I'm new to FT, so forgive me if I'm doing anything wrong.

I travel a lot, mainly for leisure, so as a result I'm looking to get the AMEX Platinum in just over a year. However, as I'm only 19, I though it'd be wiser to start out with the Gold and work my way up.

I realized after the fact that I applied for the plain gold and not the Premier Rewards Gold as I intended to. (As I'm only going to have the card for 13 mos. anyway before getting the platinum so not worried about the annual fee difference as the first year is waved.)

That being said, since I've already applied and been approved, is there any chance that I could get the 25,000 bonus offer applied if I switch to the PR gold?

I'm not too familiar with AMEX policies and such, but I know other companies will do this (and have done).

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Amex usually requires 12 months before you can request a product change. Try calling them and saying you made a mistake, and that you really were only interested in the PRG. Honestly, they will most likely tell you to submit another application for the PRG. Good luck though!

yep, phone call should do it

So... called them up, and apparently two options:

1.) Once I receive the card, process a product upgrade. However, with this the promotion won't apply.

2.) Apply for the PR... :/ However, this means another hard credit pull, which I really would rather not... as I'm going to be getting an additional card soon.

So yeah... I guess I'm just out of luck. They said I could also write in to their corporate dept. as they would be the only dept. that could do such a thing (seriously, they act as if manual point credits are the worst thing on earth)

I guess I'll just wait until I get the platinum, but man, would have been nice to have those 25,000 points for my next trip. :/

You didn't apply today did you?

No, last night... And was approved.

Why?

I was going to say if you applied today, you could've gotten in another app for the PRG which probably would have been combined into 1 inquiry.

how many hard pulls so far? In my experience Amex only pulls Experian while Citi/Chase only pulls Equifax

Ah I see.. Unfortunately no.

I guess I'll be ok with the regular gold. I'm only really using it to get in with AMEX anyway and hopefully get a nice platinum offer.

Oh, and this makes my 6th hard pull in just about a year.

Yes, manual point credits are the worst thing on earth.

I had a bonus dispute with them, which I did win, but to do so I had to call corporate and luck out enough to talk to a person. She go the whole thing settled in 10 minutes and gave me 20K points for the aggravation, but she said that they had so many people giving out adjustments right and left that they cracked down big-time.

I agree that they were very liberal; last year when I got my Plat card they had a 100K promotion going on, I knew nothing about it. I asked for the adjustment (I had gotten 50); they turned me down, but a couple months later 50K extra points mysteriously showed up in my account.

I'm actually not sure it's harder to get a Plat than a gold card. Why should it be? Plat doesn't automatically come with greater spending authority, just more features and more fee. Why would they turn down your $450?

So I've heard / speculated.

However, my thinking was that since I can get a year with no annual fee with Gold, I might as well try out the AMEX service for itself (since I probably won't be taking full advantage of the platinum until after I graduate college anyway) since the Platinum fee is charged right away.

On the flip side, I've heard / read that in other countries there are income thresholds required to get a platinum. Not sure what they are and such, or if that even applies in the US, but didn't want to take a risk with my hard pulls. (No denials yet)

regardless, you're now a Member.

Which means that even if you drop Amex for a little while and come back you'll always have a start date of 2012 from a prime card.

to echo above, yes manual point adjustments are worse than pulling teeth

I just this month successfully got the other 50k bonus bump of my !!!JANUARY 2011!!! AX Plat bonus. I've written to corporate and spoken to the executive offices more times than I care to think about. That 50k did become 75k Avios and will hopefully be well worth it as I settle into a nice Cathay F seat next year, but WOW did it take a long time to win that battle...

My advice after that would be to call the exec offices. If you get a nice person on the other end of the phone and explain what you said here and just keep saying stuff like "in the interest of customer service" blah blah blah you might get a good result.