joe_miami

Another thing that is undoubtedly driving at least a temporary spike in Plat cardholders is the credit-card “churning” craze. Aside from the Ameriprise loophole mentioned earlier, Amex, incredibly, is still allowing people to sign up for the “regular” Platinum for a bonus of up to 100,000 points, then cancel that one after a year and apply for a Schwab Platinum, with another bonus, and then a Business Platinum, etc. It can take four or five years for a person to cycle through the various Plat cards.

SP03

I can't imagine this being a significant group. And if Amex disallows it, many may still decide to keep the Platinum card

joe_miami

The difference between crowded and not crowded at the average Centurion Lounge is maybe 20 people. And the “travel hacker” crowd doesn’t believe in paying for anything.

mia

Six months is too soon to know, but it looks as if the most recent anti-churning policy will make this less common. We are seeing complaints that the policy is too strict, or surely shouldn't apply to me:

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/amer...ne-2018-a.html

American Express is coping with two mundane problems. Churning is a challenge for many service businesses, in particular those that offer new customer discounts or bonuses. Peak demand spiking well above average demand at lounges is common for infrastructure-based services. Neither of these is a novel issue. There's plenty of expertise available to address both, in addition to the free advice on Flyertalk.

RichardMannion

LoungeLizardHugo

And...to contribute my two cents on overcrowding, which I know VERY WELL from LAS and SEA, my vote is to ration visits in relation to card spend. Or allow only one guest per primary card, no access with AU cards.

Gig103

I'd venture a guess that you travel with one person who doesn't have an AU card and spend a lot (in your opinion) on your card. Everyone always writes their 'dream rules' to suit them. Why would you banish AUs? They pay their annual fees and honestly it costs more out of pocket to be a AU (as low as $58 as high as $175) than it does to have your own card ($50 after the $500 in credits).

Rather than adding access limits, they should just keep working on stopping the 'travel hacker' crowd. If Amex stopped offering the bloggers (TPG, Lucky, et. al) a commission for Amex referrals, then they'd only hawk Chase.

PWMTrav

What, exactly, are we pinning on the "travel hacker" crowd here? AFAIK, the only Platinum card without a 1st year AF is the Ameriprise variant, and there can't be that many people gaming it and crowding the lounges. Everyone else is paying their $550 a year, so I really don't see what they're doing differently than you or anyone else. The root cause here is pretty simple - at airports where a Centurion lounge exists (at least at domestic airports), it is by far the best lounge at that airport other than the occasional international- or transcon-only premium class lounge. More context -

MIA - Maybe the AA Flagship lounge gives it a run?
SEA - No contest
SFO - UA (polaris only), VX, CX (only around the times of their own flights), EK are better
PHL - No contest
LGA - No contest
LAS - No contest
IAH - BA F, UA Polaris are better
DFW - Intl F (AA, LH, QF, etc) are better

I'm sure there are some omissions in that list - I googled, and made some guesses on lounges I hadn't been in, but tried to err on the side of caution.

Point is, of the better options, none of them are accessible for a $550 AF - and that fee bundles other benefits as well. The lounges are crowded because it's the best domestic product on the market and Amex hasn't built the capacity to meet demand at the $550 price point. It's not the consumer's fault. Any consumer. Not even Amex's - you can only build so fast. Their only real levers are to increase the price or restrict access, and they're apparently trying the latter now.

Gig103

You make a very good point about how much better Centurion lounges are. But to try and explain my position, I understand that cardholders are almost all paying a $550 AF, but rather than renewing, some people bounce around product families to collect start-up bonuses and the 'calendar year' credits. On a personal plat, you can collect 100k MRs, plus $750 in Uber/Airline/Saks (and $100 for Global Entry) before paying the AF renewal, then cancel and get a different Platinum card with the added bonus of another 60k or 100k points. If travel hackers were limited to once a lifetime bonus for any Platinum card, they might not renew after the first one and drop off the access list. Or at least be paying the full $550 which would be revenue for Amex to keep expanding the lounges.

I won't pretend travel bloggers (who encourage this churning) are the only contributors to crowding, but seem like low hanging fruit (and low value clients) that can be chopped instead of limiting people to how many times they can visit, or trying to remove AU access.

icelandman2

I think the fundamental problem Amex would run into here is that there's two distinct segments being targeted by the travel bloggers. The first are the churner types described, who are more likely to cycle and avoid the AF. However, IME (anecdotally) this seems to be balanced out by those who aren't necessarily travel experts, but ARE high-value clients for the cc companies and can be drawn into their product lines with information on the value they can extract from these programs (and are unlikely to find it worthwhile to become invested in continual churning). I'd say that Amex and others are well aware of the travel bloggers' influence on churning, though would be willing to bet that they've done their internal calculus and determined that attracting/keeping the high-spend folks who may be drawn in under the same net make it worthwhile.

That being said, imo the way to go is keep primary/AU cardholders sacrosanct, reduce or even remove guest access, and perhaps give a limited number of annual guest passes to bring non-carded folks in.

gengar

The change to departure-only access is really annoying and I doubt it'll fix overcrowding, just as the three-hour limit didn't appear to help much IME.

Departure-only access may also cause problems for connecting travelers who don't yet have the BP for their onwards flight (e.g., BPs can't be printed at origin airport, or separate tickets and unable to OLCI, etc.).

Gig103

Honestly if we have to continue to limit Cent lounges, the limited guest passes sounds like the best proposed idea (so far) for two reasons. First, if someone is using the lounge often enough, they can hopefully become a cardholder or AU. The second reason is the large family of infrequent travelers might come out ahead with a bucket of passes. Imagine my coworker's scenario: Him + Wife + 2 kids, it costs him $50 to go into the Lounge for his third guest. He could add his wife as an AU but they only do a few trips a year. If he had 24 guest passes (a made up number representing 2 guests per month), then on the family trips he would be able to use 3 passes per trip and not be out of pocket for the first 8 trips, but frequent travelers would run up against a limit. Of course Amex would probably be more stingy than I am in the count, or still limit a per-session number of guests, but that's how I see it working.

CKDGM

GUWonder

Visconti

It appears Amex has followed the industrys' (Chase 5/24/Citi 24/Barclays no dup/BofA no dup) lead taking some measures to address the free-rider issue. The language introduced in new Amex Apps appear to give them wide discretion on refusing bonuses--give this new scheme some time to gain traction.

In my view, the most fair way to address overcrowding (assuming the problem continues) is, absent of any other consideration, simply take cardmember value, however they objectively determine this metric, and base their decisions purely on past and future potential customer value. Start from the bottom, and work their way up until the problem is resolved, one way or the other.

PS - My view on making the decision based purely on an impersonal level is to address the litany of complaints that are sure to follow when a large enough number of applicants are refused the bonus and/or "XXX" group protests on being unfairly targeted by whatever potential cardmember demographic adversely affected by lounge policy tinkering.