Originally Posted by
krazykanuck
Agree! The Gold Card is great now, even with the AF increase the effective AF is lower, at least for me. Plus at 4x grocery stores is an MS gold mine if you participate in that. As far as the Plat goes, even at $550 can hold a lot of value. I am clearly biased as a primarily Delta flyer and have a Centurion Lounge at my usual airports so I can see how those who don't, don't see the same value. I am also in the nice position of being able to cash out my airline GCs from the airline credit at 100% through work reimbursable travel.
With the Gold, like many others I had some coding issues shortly after the revamp where things were coding as 1x vs 4x, but they've been fixing things. I think I've had only one miss in the last 2-3 months.
The coding issue seems to mainly be with Square or Clover terminals. The only few places I noticed did not code properly use those terminals, and Amex should fix that in time. Even with that, 4x on dining is better than anything else you can get.
Chase is easier to use for redemption, but I find the premium features of the CSR to be lacking. No Centurion lounge, Delta lounges, and PP lounges are not that common in the US, so I don't even consider PP as a feature. I also use the Uber credits, which the CSR does not offer (although they do offer $300 in credits, I know). No FHR, no Hilton/Marriott status.