Originally Posted by sdsearch

One by one:

I do see a bit of value on SPG Gold, but I don't stay enough at SPG (not a single stay in the past year, for example) to warrant paying for it each year. I mainly use SPG only when I can't use Marriott, Hilton, IHG, etc (so at Iguazu Falls National Perk in Argentina, in Donrbirn Austria and also in the Lakes District east of Salzburg in Austria, etc).

Diners Club has a concierge service too. But I don't use it.

I mostly rent only with Avis, where I already have elite status much of the time (but I don't notice a consistent difference between it and regular Avis Preferred status), and I rent with Hertz so rarely (agian, not a single time in the past year) that I don't feel it's worth paying for whatever it is that elite would get me there.

Will you stop forever with Global Entry????? A fee for Global Entry is only charged once every 5 years, and so the Global Entry fee benefit is useless 4 out of 5 years that one could have an Amex Plat. (In my case, I have NEXUS, which cost half of GE btw but gives me GE benefits anyway for free, and won't need to renew for a couple more years. And will Amex Plat help me renew NEXUS???. You get Global Etnry free with NEXUS, but you can't get NEXUS fee with Global Entry, so that's why I want NEXUS, not [just] Global Entry, because I travel to Canada enough.

It's not $200 airfare credit, is it? It's ancillary purchases only last I heard (though may include gift cards). And my main paid airline is AA (where I'm lifetime Plat), and there are uncorifirmed rumors that Amex Plat may drop this credit for AA in 2015.

I don't need Boingo wifi often enough to pay extra for it. If it was GoGo in-flight wifi that was offered, that might be different story. (And more and more airports are converting to free wifi, but airplanes aren't.)

I don't need excluisve access to those "many things" Amex thinks I want. The things I might want occasional exclusive access to, Amex never offers (they're "too obscure" for Amex to offer). But again, exclusive access is not something I need every year.

Now, as mentioned above, if I could really get 2x$200 credit on gift cards (preferably for AA), by straddling 2 calendar years, then it might be worth it to get it once, get those credits, and then cancel it before the second annual fee hits. But I don't personally see enough value for me to keep this card at $450 every year.

But I do have explain that I virtually never fly for business, and though I have 160ish nights/year of hotel stays, all are paid on my own dime (and budget conscious). So I admit that I am far from the typical "road warrior" that this card seems to be aimed at.