Originally Posted by PittAir

I hope there is someone from Amex social media monitoring this forum. Mods, if not, and you have contacts, let them see what I am about to say.

All, sorry for the following rant (but if you can't rant on the internet, where can you?).

Inspirato is a destination vacation club as noted above. You buy in, and can rent multiple homes worldwide for your annual fee plus a nightly fee as well). For those of us who travel a lot and want to take our families with us worldwide, it seems like a pretty interesting idea.

I am a US Centurion (for about 8 years) with an annual spend of nearly 200K of which 75% is worldwide travel.

Like many Centurion members, I am concerned over the reduction of benefits (the loss of Continental, whose business class transcontinental service I relied on for years, really hurt, and the pending AA merger with US has me concerned as well). For me, the only reason to keep Centurion is for the travel benefits.

Inspirato has been bugging me for about 2 years to join, but I am put off by the initiation fee of $17,500--I would pay it, but my wife definitely put the kibosh on it. So imagine my delight when I heard that Inspirato was partnering with Amex. Adding an Inspirato benefit to Centurion would be a very natural fit and add value to our membership.

So now on this forum I find out that "targeted" invitations to Inspirato, waiving the annual fee, are going out to various Platinum and (potentially) Centurion members. If someone should be targeted by Amex marketing for this, I fit the profile perfectly.

So I call Inspirato two days ago (in response to yet another email bugging me to join), and tell them about the promotion. They say "it's in Amex marketing hands, we can't do anything about it."

So I call Centurion. After getting shunted around for a day or so, I send an email to their website. This results in a call this AM, where basically they say that "the offer is targeted" and offer nothing.

I am fine with targeted offers, and I don't expect to get every one of them. However, something is wrong when someone who fits the targeted profile perfectly, wants to join if given a benefit, and will spend lots on his Amex Centurion card at Inspirato homes, is blown off in this manner.

Hopefully someone in Amex Centurion will figure out that the easy way to piss a lot of us off (and have us take our spending to Chase or other competitors) is to keep reducing our benefits, and not offering obvious ones like some sort of Inspirato benefit to Centurion (and perhaps Platinum) members.

Sorry for the rant.