As a Centurion cardholder of 22 years, I finally gave up my Centurion membership.
As a loyal Amex customer since 1988, I worked hard to help the team at Centurion understand how appalling their customer service had become, how untrained their agents were, and how their new team structure vs dedicated contacts has led to booking errors, mistakes, and the general feeling one gets when calling a remote call center that knows nothing about you.
This is everything Centurion claims it is not.
I tried reaching out to senior team members at Amex with no response. They simply don’t care.
I finally spoke at length with a very sweet and nice “executive customer service” team member I had spoken to a year ago when things started going off the rails and she promised me that she would discuss my issues with “management”, but in the end was given the run around with the obligatory “I’m so sorry we can’t meet your needs and that we are losing you.
I personally was mentored and coached for years by an old leader of American Express named Alan Loren. He would be turning in his grave if he knew how terrible the Centurion product had become. He was a believer in the customer experience and in those days management was willing to speak directly to a customer to understand their concerns. No longer
AEXP happily lost me as a Centurion customer after 22 years, without doing anything to try to make amends for the terrible service received.
Here are some of the recent shortfalls that finally got me to cancel this card:
- Multiple booking errors leading to problems with travel, lost seats, lost flights, etc.
- Multiple times I received no call back from an agent I had spoken to at length and literally no way to get back in touch with them, since there is no longer a personal point of contact for Centurion members (just a large team who often isn’t available anyways and then your call goes into a pool). Centurion has become a faceless, nameless call center experience.
- There’s been a dramatic elimination of historical benefits, personalized events, and special perks - only to be replaced by a complicated grouping of “experiences”, which quickly become unavailable anyway - “Oh sorry”, they say on the same morning an event becomes available for booking, “the event you want isn't available anymore We can put you on a waitlist”. They should be ashamed of this new experience program.
- Gone is Hyatt, United, Hertz and other airline and hotel programs where status was afforded.
- When booking flights, almost always, the travel team couldn’t even find the same rates I could find online. I literally booked 5 business class seats to Turkey last summer for 1/2 the cost they quoted. When I pointed it out and showed them, they simply said they couldn’t get the same rates - baffling, as they are supposed to be the experts. They don’t even take the time to shop, offer creative suggestions that any pro would offer, or even understand or know the properties and routes they are quoting.
- When trying to book a difficult restaurant reservation through the “concierge” they called back a day later saying that nothing was available, but when I called the restaurant right afterwards, they gave me a table.
Their concierges can’t even get what any normal person can get, making you wonder why they are even there. It’s become better to simply do things yourself vs working with the Centurion team.
- When I cut my spend a year ago, in protest of their terrible service, saying I would up it again when they proved they would improve, I never even got a call asking why. They simply don’t care and Centurion cardholders are treated like everyone else. There is no more special treatment or special feeling.
Which begs the question - what is one paying $5000 for each year? Do they even really want to have this offering anymore? Do they still care about the customer experience or is it just about the bottom line? Do they even care about Customer Lifetime Value? Ugh. Just disappointing to an old timer.
There are so many more examples of terrible service, whittled down options comparable to Platinum and many more instances of a lack of travel knowledge by their team that in the end, it was time to make the change.
It seems Amex has given up on their Centurion cardholders, many of whom are their most loyal supporters and brand ambassadors. I feel given up on and am saddened by what has become of this iconic card. I suspect they expect and accept the departures as this just isn’t what they want to focus their time on.