Originally Posted by
s0ssos
So basically Amex is balking at the difference in fees in restaurants vs lounges? Restaurants costs more.
Well that's only because PP is offering like $25+ worth of credits per visit. Last year, I ran up $120 worth of charges in about 15 days (but that happened to be it for the year for me). Just so happened that all of my flying in/out of SFO after they rolled out the restaurant credit happened within a 15 day time span. But honestly, each time, I actually ordered appetizers and other sorts of extras because I hadn't yet hit the limit. I'd have thought that this benefit was pretty cool even if it was $10-15 off a meal, or if it came in the form of a 25-50% discount on menu prices. So I don't know what the big deal is about restaurants. They could easily make this the policy for example:
1. Find out what a typical lounge visit costs. Make that the amount of discount that is offered at restaurants.
2. If visiting a specific airport, you must decide whether you want to visit a restaurant OR visit the lounges on that calendar day on any specific PP account. Once you visit a lounge at that airport on a calendar day, you cannot use the benefit at a restaurant, and vice versa. MULTIPLE lounge visits on the same day would be OK, but only ONE restaurant visit OR multiple lounge visits but not both restaurants and lounges.
There are a lot of ways to curb abuse without yanking the benefit entirely. AMEX is using a nuclear weapon to do this when a firecracker will do.