American Express Platinum Card Will Earn 5x Points On Airfare & 1.5x On Purchases Of $5,000+

Starting this Thursday American Express Platinum cardholders will receive 5 membership rewards points for every $1 spent directly with any airline or on American Express’ travel portal. Earlier today the @AskAmEx twitter account mistakeningly tweeted out about this change, before saying they were referencing an old promotion. That tweet has since been deleted.

In addition to this the OPEN Business Platinum card will earn 1.5 points per dollar spent on single purchases of $5,000 or more. American Express also denied that these changes were in response to the Chase Sapphire Reserve. I hope that’s true, because these changes fail to make American Express Platinum card truly competitive with the other premium cards on the market (apart form the superior Platinum lounge access). You can read our comparisons of the the three major premium cards here.I’m hoping that this isn’t all American Express has in store for cardholders.

Additional update:

• 5x on airfare will apply to all personal variations of the Platinum card (e.g Mercedes Benz, Ameriprise, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Charles Schwab)
• 5x on airfare will NOT apply to business versions of the card, they will instead receive the 1.5x on single purchases of $5,000 or more

Hat tip to OMAAT