Splitting the Amex airline credit between 2 different airlines in the same year?
 

Is this possible to do, within the official terms? Official terms state that:

- You may choose a new qualifying airline once a year during January
- If you do not select a new airline, you remain with the airline previously selected

Nothing says that you can only select a new airline if you haven't used any of the credit yet.

So if you use part of the credit with your old airline in January, then switch your qualifying airline because it's still January, can you split your airline credits between two airlines in the same year? Or does the act of switching airlines somehow trigger a clawback?

There's only one little problem with your idea: the credit resets on January 1 :D

Exactly. Say you selected WN as your airline in 2019. So what happens in this hypothetical scenario?:

January 1: Credit resets. Let's say you have the Platinum card so you get another $200 to use for 2020.
January 3: You purchase WN early bird checkin for 3 passengers @ $75 each
January 7: Receive credit for $75. $125 remaining.
January 11: Switch qualifying airline to UA. This is permitted because it's still January.
January 13: Purchase Economy Plus seating on a UA flight for 2 passengers @ $80 each
January 17: Receive credit for $125 of the $160 purchase

Can this happen? (In reality, you'd have the rest of the year to burn the credit for the new qualifying airline).

Oh, I see what you're getting at. I suppose it would all come down to how good of a day the representative was having (unless for all of January it can be self-selected via the site?).

Self selection option has always showed up for me for all of January if I don't use it. Right now it no longer does for me however, because I switched my airline back to UA already (I have a change fee to burn the credit on so I figured I might as well).

I don't know, but my best guess would be that there wouldn't be a clawback, but rather that it would very difficult to switch after using part of the credit. I presume the online method for switching disappears the moment you use of part of the credit, even if that's in January. I presume then that if you try to ask someone to switch it for you, they're likely to run into the same thing. But I don't know either of those for a fact, because I didn't ever use a partial credit in January without switching airlines first. in previous years, I was able to use up the whole credit on one gift card if I used it in January, so I never had any credit left over after my first use of the credit. This year, I had to switch airlines first, so I obviously can't switch again until next year.

That, it seems, would be grounds for a complaint to Amex, given that the official terms don't say anything about all of the credit having to be used with the same airline. Lots of people might buy something in January that triggers a credit without even trying, and want to switch their preferred airline later in the month. I would think this would generate a lot of complaint calls, which is something Amex definitely does not want.

Yeah so, last year I switched to WN and purchased 2x$100 GC, about 3 days apart. But as I had already made the switch to do this, the option to switch again disappeared. If WN GCs still worked this year, I could have gotten a data point on this, but I just switched to UA since I didn't have anything useful I could burn the credit on for WN.

Still, I've got to think at least ONE person on here would be able to get a data point on this. If you want to switch airlines but can burn a partial amount of the credit with last year's preferred airline in January, and especially if you are unsure about being able to use the full amount of the credit with your new preferred airline without jumping through hoops, it seems like this would be a good option to try.

While it isn't published policy, you can generally switch your airline once(?) if you call/chat and ask nicely even if you've previously used some of it during the year. Lots of DPs of this in the various airline threads.