Wait. Was Amex Offers Just Devalued?
Anya Kartashova August 01, 2018
Amex Offers are a great way to save money by simply using American Express cards at select merchants. The feature is available to all Amex cardholders and is one of the ways to justify annual fees.
Related: The Best Way to Save Money with Amex Offers
No More Multi-Tab Stacking
In the past, we have covered a possibility to use multiple Amex Offers with the same merchant by holding multiple American Express cards, either charge or credit. For the offers to apply to different cards under the same login, you would open multiple tabs in your browser and add the offer to each card in each tab.
Unfortunately, it appears that the option is now dead, according to multiple bloggers.
In an attempt to test the claim for myself, I logged into my American Express account and tried to add the same Amex Offer on multiple cards. It worked. So, I tried another offer, and both added again. I logged out and back in and noticed that one of the offers was gone, but the second one remained intact.
What I Think Happened
I’m speculating, but I think that not only the merchant has to be the same, but the actual offer has to be the same for it not to apply twice. In my case, I tried an offer with both The Platinum Card and the Starwood Preferred Card. One is a charge card, and the other is a credit card. The first offer earns bonus points, but the other earns a statement credit.
I think that because the offers are technically different, both remained on my cards. The other offer I tried was for bareMinerals: spend $50, get $10 back. Both of the offers earn a credit statement and therefore were considered duplicate by the system, so one was removed.
From now on, when you add these offers to your cards, only the first offer will stick. For this reason, make sure you add the offers you want to the right cards because the specific card must be used for the offer to be triggered. Unfortunately, it’ll be harder to justify paying fees on some of these lesser-used Amex cards for those who stacked Amex Offers on multiple cards.
What do you think of the way Amex Offers now apply?
A lot of offers have this in the fine print (and have for a while now) " Limit 1 enrolled Card per Card Member across all American Express offer channels" or " Limit of 1 statement credit(s) per American Express® Card across all American Express offer channels". I have always been under the impression that you can only use an offer once, regardless of how many cards you have. So to me, if you have been able to use it more than once, then thats a bonus, rather than a loss if you can't.
I recall noticing that if the same offer were available on multiple cards (say, a cash back rather than a miles/points offer, since I have one MR and one Delta card), it would disappear from the other when I applied one of them. This would have been a year or two ago when I was using my AmEx cards regularly, so I assumed this was as designed.