dinanm3atl

Not sure if that is really the case but I can vouch for them. I rarely use my debit card for anything Sub 10 times a year(if that). I woke up one morning to a bunch of GCs bought on it. Called. Money back. 15min drive to a larger branch than the one 2min from my house and have a replacement card in hand.

I was SUPER surprised at the quality and speed of service. They handled the fraud charges 100%. I never heard from them again on the issue.

lepmd

True, I could buy points or a gift card. This brings us back to an underlying theme of this thread: Chase is making things easier than AmEx. I don't have to "hack" the travel credit with Chase. They've already reimbursed me for travel-related expenses that I didn't even think would be reimbursed. I was able to use my entire $300 credit during one trip without having to think about how to use it. Chase will continue to take AmEx's millennial customers by making things easier. ^

AmEx could win the credit card war if they would make things easier, provide more points for dining, and make points worth more. If my points earning is only 1/$1, then I'm going to use my CSR because I can get a $50 Target gift card from UR for 5,000 points vs. 7,143 points on AmEx MR.

STS-134

Sure, I understand why a lot of people don't even bother with AmEx. But if you are going to hold the Plat card, I don't understand why you'd give "free" money to AmEx like that. As long as I hold the Plat, I will play the game and extract as much value out of the card as I possibly can. If I ever tire of doing this, I'm not going to reward AmEx for making it difficult to use my benefits -- I'm going to cancel the card entirely.

notquiteaff

It's called breakage. By not just essentially sending you a $300 check at the beginning of each year they reduce their costs because some members are not motivated or organized enough to work out a way to claim the travel reimbursement. And that (potentially) make it possible to offer certain benefits (lounge access?).

In other words, they of course know that it could be made easier. But that would cost them more money, and they probably have better data than some flyertalking card members to determine whether a potential increase in its member base would be sufficient to negate the cost increase.

josephstern

How much are you getting for reselling your Boingo account?

lepmd

I agree with you. This is exactly why I'm canceling my Plat. I tried to cancel it last year after realizing that I forgot to use the travel credit the previous year and also after generally becoming apathetic to the benefits other than FHR, but they gave me a hefty retention bonus to make up for it and an extra $100 travel credit that year. Then, I forgot to use it again last year. In my defense, we moved twice and purchased two homes within months (both requiring renovations), so maximizing my benefits wasn't at the top of my priority list.

STS-134

That Boingo benefit is something I've always seen as worthless. People actually pay money for that? Most of the Boingo hotspots around here are free anyway (McDonald's, Starbucks, etc) and everyone who would want to use them already has a cellular data plan.

sdix

Agree in US except for some airports in the US but internationally the Boingo benefit is huge.

tmiw

People probably paid money for it more often in the past since cellular data plans generally prohibited tethering (unless you rooted your phone or paid for a very overpriced tethering plan, of course).

Explorer789

Again, this is a benefit most geared towards those who travel. I have found their speeds to be much faster than whatever free wifi the many airports provide. Beyond that, I have not really used it elsewhere given that I have unlimited cell data.

dinanm3atl

Few airports I visit yearly have 'free' for 30min(or no free at all) and Boingo. So I use it.

Troopers

This. The Plat card is travel benefiting card. It's hard to extract value out of something that it's not designed for.

STS-134

I've never really used Boingo though, even when I travel int'l. It's easier to just pop in a SIM card and use my phone or tether. Actually, come to think of it I did use once at ORD, where they had the previously mentioned 30 minute time limit. Once I ran out, I opened a console on my computer and ran:

openssl rand -hex 6 | sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//' | xargs sudo ifconfig wlan0 ether

I was then back online for another 30 minutes and I could have repeated the process again as often as I needed to. This works as long as it does not randomly generate a multicast MAC address (01:00:5e:xx:xx:xx or 33:33:xx:xx:xx:xx) and the chances of that happening are very small. I guess another problem is if it randomly generates the MAC address of someone who has been there within the last 24 hours and has used the free trial; chances of this happening are so miniscule that you could probably do this every 30 minutes for 20 years without it happening. Regenerate again in the unlikely scenario that this happens.

SeaHawg

That dump Love Field comes to mind - nearly lost my mind in there after a WN MX delay, and I was coming off 20 hours in the air and didn't feel like going down to Deep Ellum. Now, if only they could get a lounge and more restroom space...

jediwho

Proforma earnings. So, Q1 of last year, they had Costco and Q1 of 2017, they did not. So, to compares apples to apples and just for comparison, they adjusted transactions for revenue on Costco cards and said that without Costco revenue in Q1 2016, their revenue would be up 6.2%.

Check the coverage here:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...marketing-push

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ameri...205719027.html