Before this thread was opened and before the US bloggers put up threads about this. I heard that this was hitting HKG Amex Plat users and suspected that it wouldn’t be long for Amex’s cost-cutting and budget-target objectives coming with an eventual hit against customers with US Amex Plats too.

It seems that Priority Pass found a way to make money off the PP restaurant arrangement and that is why it expanded the restaurant arrangement, way more so in the US than anywhere else. Could PP have done the airport restaurant expansion access in part because of how Amex, Chase and Citi (and others) were paying for their bank card customers’ use of bank card-related Priority Pass? If so, I have to give Priority Pass’s owners and and management some credit for having set up a way to increase the amount of money they got from their bank card partners and to increase the benefit for the bank card customers. I can’t say I’m surprised to see Amex cut it and being the first at it for PP restaurants.

I do note that this cut from Amex may hit more than just Priority Pass-affiliated restaurants.

It would be sustainable if the average # of annual visits by cardholders was kept to a reasonable level, maybe a few a year. It does not work when you have too many frequent visitors and not at all if you have more than a few abusers who visit multiple restaurants for takeout in a single day.

The better course would be to establish reasonable limits as was done for lounge guests (again likely the result of abusers). 10 visits a year would keep the majority of travelers happy (including me) while weeding out the heavy users that break the bank.

A better way to use the credit is on Uber eats. I have a sneaking suspicion that Uber artificially inflates ride prices when you have available credit. Uber eats, meanwhile, can’t really change menu prices.

I got to use the $28 restaurant credit exactly one time, last year, SFO, Yankee Pier (breakfast). It was just a salmon lox bagel and Irish coffee.

A few weeks ago, I passed Yankee Pier on the way to AMEX CL for a 1/2 hour visit (flight out of T3). They had a line and it looked fully packed inside. I was thinking, how many people were using $28 PP credits. Guess the answer was too many.

The next thing to go, AMEX might restrict SFO CL visits to people flying out of T3.

Amex has had some people working on deals with restaurants/coffee shops/bars at some airports to replicate sort of what Priority Pass has done with some airport FBE locations. They worked on this for Amex Plat/Centurion cardholders even at some airports that have Priority Pass lounges. But it’s been so thinly worked on that it doesn’t seem to be a prequel to Amex going big into proviidng at-airport, non-lounge FBE benefits of the sort that Priority Pass has been growing.

I suspect that with this Amex cut aimed at Priority Pass, Priority Pass may even be less eager to expand the non-lounge FBE tie-ins than it has been. And any Chase or Citi replication of this Amex move may result in Priority Pass becoming even more shy.