Originally Posted by
jags86
With the continued devaluation of airline and hotel rewards and continued erosion of the ability to earn significant amounts of most transferable points, they are only really worthwhile pursuing if you have lots of spend and can earn enough to book international business class+ redemptions. Economy redemptions don't make much sense. Very hard to justify wanting to hold multiple annual fee AMEX cards -- $945 in fees for Gold & Platinum -- without significant earnings.
Sure. Some people can use a lot of the "coupon book" credits organically and that can greatly reduce the effective cost of holding these cards. Others can't, and then it gets harder. In fact, I'm enough of an edge case in terms of using them that the $100 annual credit I get from AUM on the Schwab Platinum card may be the difference between keeping it and canceling it based on how I value the other aspects of the card. It's close. Leaning toward keeping it, but as I said earlier, this policy change isn't going to convince me to put much (if any) 1X spend on the Plat, even if I can justify the numbers for keeping it.
And yeah, international business class redemptions ARE the sweet spot -- without them, I'm just as well off taking the sure thing, 1.1 CPP redemption from Schwab. Domestic economy **might** get 1.5 CPP if you're good but is that moving the needle enough to not take the cashout from Schwab before more devaluations? Frankly if I weren't going for those "aspirational" redemptions I might not have started playing in this sandbox, and even if I did, I might just cash out with Schwab (again, IF I weren't shooting for better redemptions with airline partners).