deltaflyer007

My first post to FlyerTalk! Woot!

I have been a long time anonymous reader but I finally signed up because I need your [collective] help.

In February, I signed up for the personal AMEX PR card with the 25K bonus if I spent $2K in 3 months. I got an email offer and still have it.

I decided I wanted a human to sign me up so I called the 800 number and talked with a nice person. BTW, the whole call was recorded by AMEX with the annoying beep every 5 seconds. Anyway, I gave her the offer code from the email and she repeated back the offer to me. Everything went smoothly and I got the cards in about a week.

Fast forward 3 months. I spent the $2K as required and no points appear in my account. I called the MR 800 number and they said it might take 6-8 weeks to post to the account. I wait the 8 weeks and nothing.

I call again. They say now I didn't ever qualify for the 25K points and that I really qualified for 10K points which showed up in my account a few days ago. I told them twice on the phone and twice through the AMEX messaging that I have the email proof that I got the offer and that the agent repeated it back to me verbatim when I signed up. They said every time that they will have to look into it and will get back to me in 7 days. It has now been over a week.

What should I do at this point?

chff

My mother had changed from a Delta AMEX to a Blue, and after about a half year I called to check how many MR points she had, and the answer was NONE! I asked why, they said because she didn't "sign up for the MR program", I said, it should be automatic, wasn't told to do so, they said they can't do anything.
I called AMEX Excutive Office in NYC, spoke to someone there, and they gave me the points on the amount spend "of good will"
(PS I called SPG to make sure I was getting the points there, and wanting to hear after a few months "oh, you had to sign up seperate for SPG.....")

redtop43

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ameri...ding-them.html

Steve M

That happened to me when I first signed up for a business Platinum charge card. I got the card, and having no other Amex MR cards at the time, called in to sign up for MR. They took my request, and even gave me a confirmation number. But when the first statement arrived, no indication of MR was there. I called customer service, and they told me the same thing as in your mother's situation: you have to sign up for MR separately. I said that I had, and even had a confirmation number, but nobody I could reach at Platinum or MR customer service could find any record of it, nor did anyone know anything about confirmation numbers for such a transaction. So, they signed me up, but told me that charges prior to MR enrollment weren't eligible. They weren't enough to justify me spending a bunch of time fighting it, so I just left it be. But I would imagine that they do lose a certain number of new cardholders by doing things like that.

chff

Do what I did, call the exec office. (I was planing to call the BBB to complain if that wouldn't help, but the exec office even gave me double the points out of "good will")

Air Koryo

It seems that the standard business model for Amex is to award only the minimal signup bonus, then award the entitled remainder upon a call-in complaint. This has been the case for myself and several friends & family over the past year with Amex Canada.

I would guess that Amex counts on a certain rate of breakage where new cardholders receive a token signup bonus and don't know any better.

TennisPro

I hope this is not true, and that it is just a mis-coded account signup offer in the system.

On the bright side, I received my full SPG signup bonus just a month ago or so.

deltaflyer007

Just an update.

I received 2 letters by snail mail saying that they would not give me points and that basically said I never received the offer I stated. I was offended and angry because I couldn't get anyone on the front lines to even look at the offer email.

So as suggested above, I googled around and found the main number for AMEX Executive offices which is 212-640-2000. I got an operator who asked who I needed to talk to. As suggested at this link, I initially asked for Lynne Biggar (Lynne is a generic name. I found out Lynne's a female in case you ever want to call her), who is the Executive VP & GM -- Membership Rewards & Strategic Card Services at American Express. The operator asked what I needed to talk to Lynne about and I said I had a MR points problem that I needed help resolving. The operator said I should try Executive Customer Services first and sent me there.

After a 1 minute wait on hold, I talked with a nice person named James. Amazingly, he asked for the original email offer I had received which no one on the front lines wanted to look at. The call was over in 10 minutes and he left me with his email address and direct phone number in case I needed to contact him.

By the next day, I had all the 25K points and he gave me 7500 unsolicited points for my trouble. He apologized numerous times and I said that I was sorry that I had to call him and wish someone on the front lines could have solved this on the first call. He agreed said that he would pass that message up the chain.

redtop43

This seems to be their routine. (In my case, I had a 50K points dispute and they gave me 20K extra.) The phone and email CSR's are helpless, but the folks at the executive office have the juice to make things right.