American Express Desperate To Keep Platinum Customers, Offering High Retention Bonuses (50,000 Points)

When you’re annual fee is due soon (or if it’s already posted, Read: Annual fee rules for each card issuer) we recommend calling retention to see if the card issuer will offer any sort of bonus for not cancelling the card. American Express recently increased the annual fee to $550 on the Personal Platinum card, in addition they have increased the standard sign up bonus on their Platinum cards and offered lucrative upgrade offers on both the Personal Platinum & Business Platinum cards.

If you’re an existing cardholder and have the annual fee due soon on the personal Platinum card, the retention specialist (or whatever they call themselves) will let you know that you’ll only be charged an annual fee of $450. Keep in mind that will happen regardless of whether you called retention or not, the rules for that are as follows:

• Existing cardholders that have their annual fee due before August 31st, 2017 will get billed $450 for this year
• Existing cardholders that have their annual fee due on or after September 1st, 2017 will be billed $550

Retention specialists have been offering extremely generous retention bonuses though. Some datapoints from this reddit thread & my readers on Twitter:

• 50,000 points: 1, 2
• 30,000 points: 1, 2, 3, 4
• $300: 1, 2
• $200 or 10,000 points: 1
• 5,000 points + 15,000 points after $3,000 in spend within 3 months: 1
• 20,000 points after $3,000 in spend: 1, 2