Re these cards: remember we’re all FTers and a small community relative to the general population. We care A LOT about little things; the general population does not.

A quick internet search said there are 7.5M Delta Amex cardholders. Let’s say the uptake rate is the inverse of the annual fee such that the Reserve is 1: PLT 2: Gold 4. That means roughly 1M reserve cards. According to Gary Leff, there are approximately 2M vanilla Amex PLT cards out there, so my estimate passes the sniff test. Along the same lines, it’s estimated there are 100k Centurion cards floating out there, which follows a reasonable proximity to my inverse annual fee hypothesis.

With that in mind, if Amex makes a $1,250 card, there might be 500k people who get it. That’s a small market to develop and sell into. Fine… there’s still a lot of revenue here.

What are you going to sell that 500k people find irresistible enough to double their annual fee?

-it might include unlimited club, but Amex says MOST reserve cardholders live within 15 visits. Plus you’d rather folks use the card to spend.
-maybe other delta stuff where the cost to provide is less than the marketed value. Status levels? More companion pass, perhaps one that allows international or D1?
-360? Sell that card for $2k?
-more Amex coupon stuff?
-marriott status too? Can you do that without killing that card line?
-IHG or Hilton status? Hilton may be possible given the current promo with DL.
-unlimited guesting into the club?
-Hertz platinum status

This is the type of stuff I’d predict simply because this is adding on to a mature product line; no one is going to create a wildly different playbook. Similarly, ask yourselves: can you imagine 500k new customers who hold the reserve card who will gladly pay double for FF program minutes? I don’t see it.