Maybe someone in the right department at Amex started reading FT.

Screenshot of the reimbursement and it being reversed? always post a screenshot else it'll be taken with a grain of salt.

On Jan 3 I bought 2 Delta $50 electronic GCs. On Jan 4, I got a credit of $100 on my gold Amex. Nothing reversed to date.

Bought 4x $50 eGCs on Jan 14. Posted 15th, reimbursed automatically 16th. Will watch and post if reversed.

Same for me. A lot quicker than AA GC's last year.

Nevermind, disregard this. It looks like the reimbursement posted yesterday. Seems buying 4x$50 in one transaction is still safe.

Thank you AMEX bought 4 $50 e-certs and was reimbursed within three days which included MLK day holiday. Very happy--good luck to all.

Stupid question - any reason why these gift cards should be bought in $50 increments rather than $100 (PRG) or $200 (Platinums) in one shot?

Gift cards are not a valid use of the fee credits under the T&Cs, but because Amex doesn't have full visibility as to what each charge that comes through consists of, they apparently use certain rules to guess whether each charge counts or not. And it seems that one such rule is that charges below a certain amount are assumed to be valid fees, even if they're not, and are automatically reimbursed.

For Delta that limit seems to fall somewhere between $50 and $100 -- I recently bought a $100 GC to test it and was not reimbursed. The actual limit might be like $65 or something, but since most people are trying to spend an even $100/$200, buying gift cards in $65 increments wouldn't be much more useful than buying them in $50 increments.

(Some more expensive fees which are nonetheless valid under the T&Cs might not be automatically reimbursed, but in those cases customers can ask Amex to make a manual reimbursement -- but that doesn't work for GCs since those aren't valid under the T&Cs.)

Ah got it - thanks! Still odd this is automatically approved, if the Platinum has a $200 fee reimbursement and you spend $50 x4 (I mean come on lol)... I would have thought something obvious as that would trigger a manual reimbursement like you said.

I think Amex also has somewhat mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand they don't want to give away money unnecessarily. But on the other hand they know that a lot of people are doing the math on the Platinum card and thinking "it's worth it to me at an effective annual fee of $250, but not at an effective annual fee of $450", so Amex doesn't want to crack down too hard on people claiming the fee through loopholes for fear of losing those customers altogether.

Presumably there are a fair number of non-Flyertalker Amex Platinum card holders (particularly longtime card users, since this credit is only 7ish years old) who don't know about this trick and who routinely fail to get the full value from their credits, and Amex is happy about that too.

It's an interesting contrast to the Chase Sapphire Reserve credits, which are almost impossible to avoid obtaining if you use the card regularly.

Thanks! I guess you could be right about this.

And also, regarding that limit... I recently paid $385 for excess checked baggage and put it on my Business Platinum - automatically approved without manual intervention. Maybe just for even numbered amounts there are limits I guess?

More likely the algorithm automatically reimburses all charges less than a threshold amount ($6x), and looks for additional information in the transaction detail to evaluate larger ones.

I am dealing with an account where the DL reimbursement credit has still not shown up for purchases of $50 (*4) eCerts gotten on December 31st but which posted to the account with a January 1st date.

I'm still waiting to see what happens with that before we make calls.

Shot in the dark here, but perhaps you had already exhausted your 2016 credit earlier in the year?