I imagine that Amex Platinum membership will decline dramatically due to this. I like the club access, but I don't fly often enough to justify the fee. All of the other benefits look like useless fluff to me. Amex bribed me with $50 points/per month through January to upgrade from gold. A year before they gave me an amazing $500 worth of points just to get the gold plus waived the fee. All signs point towards me downgrading to Gold in February, or cancelling completely. I may just transfer all the points to Delta or Southwest and be done with them.
This is a shame because I like the flexibility the rewards points provide, but other than that the Gold has not got much going for it. I doubt the companion fare program was not valued by members, as the letter stated, it was just too expensive. Too bad they could not just lower it to 1-2 companion fares per year instead of 4 per card, find a tweak that would keep it feasible. I used the companion fare once and saved $200, so I've banked about $1000 from Amex in a little over a year, not counting the $185 waived gold fee and the $625 I paid a couple of months ago to upgrade my wife and I to Platinum.