chickenmittens

There are a lot of particulars to this story that I can't share yet, but does anyone have any advice about how to reach American Express' "corporate" department that is in charge of disputes? Basically, I have a multi-thousand dollar charge on my card because of an upgrade that I shouldn't have been charged for and none of the Rewards reps have had the power to do anything about it so they "escalated to corporate" about 30 days ago. Told me I should hear back in 7-10 days and nothing so far. Bill is now due in 10 days.

It's maddening that none of the reps even have access to the case and none can even give me a phone number to call where I can get status on it. I have a reference number for the case but nobody with whom to discuss it. I also have a letter all ready to email or snail-mail if I just knew where, but sending a blanket mail to a main headquarters address doesn't seem like the best bet.

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(Edit: Adding more details now)

Hey there. OP here. Sorry I didn't fill in more of the blanks on the original post. I'm just trying to give Amex a chance to do the right thing here, but it's been almost 40 days now and it's still "pending" without so much as an update.

So, here's what happened: we were getting ready to take a 15 hour flight home after a trip and got to the airport three hours early to make sure we got the best chance at a mileage upgrade to business class. We always fly coach but for 163,000 miles, we could upgrade so it seemed like a great deal. We tried to transfer the points from our Amex account to Emirates but it wasn't working. Something to do with recently switching Amex cards (both cards were in the same account and the points are still in there). We called up Amex from the airport and the Amex agent told us that in order to get the upgrade, we should pay for the upgrade in cash and then call Amex after the flight at which point they'd have the charge reversed and paid for in points. That sounded great, as it seemed like something that happened from time-to-time whereby the card company and the airline would just work things out if there was a points snafu. We thus paid for the upgrade in cash (~$8300!), took the flight, and a day or two later, called Amex to begin the process of reversal. That is when the problem started. The agent told me Amex didn't have a policy of doing this and that they weren't able to reverse the charge. !!! I told them there is no way in the world I would voluntarily pay $8300 for an airline upgrade (especially when Emirates offered us an $1800 cash upgrade a couple of days earlier), and then I got passed on to a supervisor. The supervisor was very nice but was also befuddled about what to do so he "escalated it to corporate". I have a reference number for that. I assume that means going back and listening to the phone call, which I hope they can do. The problem is, they originally told me 7-10 days, and it's been almost 40 now. They keep telling me to call back every 10 days or so, and so I have, but nobody can tell me *anything* other than it's "pending in corporate". All I want to do is get a phone number, email, or mail address of anyone I can talk to over there and just get an update and maybe even further explain my side of what happened here. There seems to be some sort of firewall between rewards/disputes and corporate. Note: this has not been filed as normal "dispute" since it's not a fraudulent charge. I tried to do that too, just to make sure it's getting attention, but the people in that department advised me against it.

Anyway, bottom line here: I have an $8300 on my card that is only there because Amex advised me it would be temporary. Very stressful.

Any ideas? Apologies but I don't really want to get into the full details of the charge yet, because for all I know, it IS being handled and I don't want to be unfair to Amex.