Originally Posted by
Braindrain
It's more or less the same. There's a 50K bonus for getting the Amex AeroPlat card from time to time, but at $499, it's hardly a deal.
The
best were the CIBC Aerogold convenience cheques that gave bonus AP points. Just pre-pay and write the cheque to your own account. Probably too many people were doing that as I haven't seen them for years.
Man, those were the days! Will never forget when we first got those in the mid 90's. It started as 10 checks with a max of 5K each for 50K miles. We did exactly what Braindrain described: we each put $5K in our accounts then write check to wife and her to me. Rinse and repeat. No interest and 50K miles each for free. Then it dropped to 5 checks, then it went down to $2500 max and then they stopped giving miles altogether for them.
These days, 25K for free business gold with $75 cash back from GCR ($3K spend over 3 months) and I still value the Amex Plats at $499 for 50K to put us over the top for our yearly F trips to Asia 1.
Some people have managed to get prorated refunds on their Amex AeroplanPlats but you need to be a high roller and I've only heard of a couple of instances.