Well, this is a major devaluation of the card and makes me now question the value. For those with heavy AU club visits, I could see wanted to place a limit on them. But they went from very good benefits to near-zero in one big devaluation.

for a $400 AF card, the only valuable benefit is the $300 credit which is sometimes difficult to use — this year I couldn’t get flights to book (kept throwing errors over 2 days) so I ended up taking a different airline’s flights to use the benefit.

they should have given something like United did on their lower cards — give a limited number of passes (say 3 per AU). I agree many lounges are overcrowded but the Amex lounges have only gotten slightly less crowded with the guest restrictions that Cap 1 has now copied.

I’ve been waitlisted 2 of my 3 Cap 1 lounge visits, both in Denver (walked right into Vegas but it was middle of the day).

Priority Pass absolutely sucks eggs since COVID, there are so many major airports that no longer have PP lounges, including EWR, LGA, JFK (other than one terminal that isn’t accessible on the air side), LAX, ATL (one mediocre lounge in the international terminal). So there is no way I could fathom paying $125 for PP access unless I knew my home and frequent destination airports had lounges. I think I’ve been to a total of two PP lounges in the last 18 months (one in Asia and one in the states — even the Asian lounge was pretty meager by US standards whereas the lounge United gave me access to blew the PP lounge away).