Platinum [UK] Card: Was It Worth It This Year?
 

So, I'm coming up to my renewal of my Platinum card after having it for a year at the new £450.00 annual fee.

What have I had out of it? Quite a lot, I guess. A successful travel insurance claim; though not without some serious amount of chasing. £70 Matches fashion voucher. Free night at a £350 a night London hotel. Probably around £200 in Foursquare promotions.

Then again, the values don't quite match those figures. I'd never have stayed in that London hotel if it wasn't an Amex offer, so the value of £350 is false. I'd never have spent £70 at Matches on socks if I hadn't had the voucher, etc.

Not sure what to do now. Do I refer the wife, and keep it for another year in her name? Do I just knock it on the head for a while and see how I get on without it?

I'm really torn on this one. Anyone else in the same boat?

Yes, I'm renewing at the end of this month.

I haven't kept a particularly close eye on it this year, but I would say I've had at least £1200 of real, genuine value out of the card (freebies, giveaways, benefits etc)

The £450 fee is always a tough one to justify when it comes round, and although I will keep the card, I am going to be asking for something to sweeten the deal. I'm thinking a few thousand MR points and hopefully spreading the annual fee over 12 months.

MAN-FF

Well I've just seen that it's 53k MRs if I refer the wife at the moment, so I think that's the way I'm going to go. I'm sure I can move my Plat MRs to my Gold Card without any problems, so I'm going to do that, hit the spend, get the bonus and then make a decision.

Your MR account is standalone to your card account, so the points from all your Amex cards go into the same one

Nope. My Gold Card and Plat Card MRs go into separate pots.

That is certainly not the case if you have successfully self-referred, which is the case with the OP if I remember correctly. You end up with 2 separate MR accounts.

However the card T&C say that on closing a card, they will move the MRs to any other MR account you have.

My renewal was last week, so I rang them up to say I was in two minds about renewing and to explain why. I mentioned the CX potentially going away - response was "it's up to CX after the first year, nothing to do with us". I mentioned the poor earning rate vs gold card and mbna, and was told "maybe you should change to the gold card". Overseas fees, apparently no change on the horizon. Hertz level drop with their program changes, no change etc. I was also told there was no waiver or reduction available on the fee, nor any bonus MR points for renewing :(

I think for me, it's just about worth it, but I'd be interested to know if anyone has managed to get a discount / renewal MR points and how!

I did self refer, and I did end up with 2 MR accounts (and two online Amex accounts). I got them to merge the online accounts (so my GC now shows alongside me other Amex cards) but the MRs still seem to post to the individual cards. This must mean I effectively still have 2 MR accounts, I guess.

I have two MR accounts, which is somewhat confusing... One for my Plat charge card, one for my Plat MR credit card. The only reason I haven't asked them to merge the two yet though is so I can test to see if they get different bonus offers, though sadly neither has had any yet!

When I did it, I just registered the new card to my existing Amex account. However, each card had its own MR account. A phone call got the MR accounts merged.

I'll get them to sort it when I phone to cancel.

I'm actually annoyed that I didn't think for my wife to have the card in the first place, as she would actually benefit from the CX Gold status. Currently when we travel via LHR on RFS flights, I can only guest one person into GF which means that my wife has to go off shopping whilst my daughter and I go inside (although I have a good hit rate of having a "quiet word" with someone as they approach GF and kindly asking them to guest my daughter in).

This would mean we could use GC without any fuss. ^

We also made a claim this past year after having £1,100 of belongings stolen in NYC. To be fair to Amex and their underwriters, we found them to be very efficient and understanding. They paid out in just 7 days from the date of claim.

NYPD on the other hand......

MAN-FF

How does the self-referral work?

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_1_4 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10B350 Safari/8536.25)

I had two MR accounts with the Plat and the Business Plat. One reason for this is that they had different earning rates, which Amex said would require different accounts.

They were ok once I got hold of someone senior who I could chase up. Then things were settled in days. It just seemed that AXA UK and AXA US couldn't communicate with each other.