Originally Posted by
qnxr01
I'm spending about $1m/year on my Amex Plat. Also probably another $100k+/year through Amex Travel. Requested an invite late last year through the site and even tried to speak to an account manager, got the runaround. One of my colleagues is a former Amex guy, and tells me that in Los Angeles, $1m/year doesn't cut it, because they have geographic requirements in areas like SF, NY, and LA. If you're living in a rich zip code, the annual spend required for an invite apparently is much higher. I've heard like $1.5m-$1.7m/year in LA. So while there's people getting invites with $300k/year of spend across the country -- it's not in those geographies. Which is really crappy and disappointing, to be honest. Especially when the norm today is like 90 minute hold times for Platinum Concierge. Imagine spending seven figures a year on a card where Amex is taking like 3% cut of the transactions as profit, and the best they can offer you is an hour and a half on hold. It's pretty nuts how I spend next to nothing on my Chase Sapphire Reserve and get better customer service from them, because on their sliding scale metric of being exclusive within geographies, my tiny million-per-year spend doesn't qualify me for anything other than their rapidly-declining customer service for Platinum, because of my zip code. Even though, I'm objectively a more valuable customer than the Centurion card holder spending $250k-$350k a year in Wyoming. But it's part of the "mystique" .
How do they determine which region you’re from? Billing address?
Originally Posted by
qnxr01
My wife, who is an additional card holder, actually spends quite a bit of money on Rodeo Drive.
This is my biggest question with the supposed geographic spend requirements. Surely many high spenders have pied a terres, beach homes, or even just travel to other places frequently. So what determines my geographic region? My primary residence is in NYC but my billing address is in an entirely different state. In terms of dollar amount spent, most of my spend is in Florida. So what region would I be in? Changing a billing address to a different state is trivial.
Originally Posted by
EWRFlyerNJ
I don’t see why NYC metro would have lower requirements than LA and I was running 650/700 a year in the three years before I got mine (this summer). I don’t think your info is entirely accurate.
If it’s truly by zip code, I can understand the discrepancy. The range for the NYC metro area is pretty huge (same with LA).