Are Amex Fine Hotels and Resorts (FHR) bookings more expensive than booking direct?

One of the key benefits associated with the refreshed Platinum Card® from American Express is the $600/year hotel credit (split across two 6-month periods) which can be triggered when a card member uses their card to pay for eligible prepaid Fine Hotels + Resorts and the Hotel Collection bookings through American Express Travel.

This benefit has been widely touted as an important path to getting great value out of the Platinum Card and a great way to recoup most of the card’s hefty annual fee ($895). But is this benefit as good as it sounds?

You don’t have to search the internet for very long before you find people suggesting that the value of the Platinum Card’s hotel credit is overblown because bookings through Amex Travel come with a mark-up and that booking directly with a hotel or with a chain is cheaper, so what’s the truth here?

Well, I had a bit of time on my hands recently, so I decided to see what I would find if I compared a few prices on Amex Travel with the prices I could find when I checked a property’s own booking engines and what follows are the results of those searches.

I checked the prices for FHR bookings and for Hotel Collection bookings. This article will focus on Amex FHR while a follow-up article will discuss the Hotel Collection results.

The Platinum Card hotel credits

The Platinum Card’s annual $600 hotel credit is split in two – cardholders get a $300 credit which can be used between January and June and a second $300 credit which can be used between July and December every year.

These credits can be triggered by booking a stay of 1-night or more at an Amex Fine Hotels & Resorts (FHR) property or a stay of 2-nights or more at an Amex Hotel Collection property.

The methodology I used

I kept this as simple as possible.

• I picked 20 major cities from around the world
• I picked a random weekend in 2026 (a Friday and Saturday night)
• I entered the cities and the travel dates into Amex Travel and then semi-randomly* selected an FHR property form the list of properties presented to me.
• I compared the best prices shown on Amex Travel with the best prices shown by the hotels/chains through their own booking channels to see what (if any) differences there were.
• Where possible, I noted down the best non-flexible rate on offer and the best flexible rate on offer across all the platforms I checked and I made sure that I was comparing like with like.
• I also made sure that the type of room being offered (size, view, etc…) was the same on Amex Travel and on the hotel sites.

*My selection was semi-random and not completely random because I wanted to make sure that I didn’t accidentally include too many properties from the one chain or brand in my search results.

Amex Fine Hotels & Resorts (FHR)

As a reminder, these are the benefits that accompany an Amex FHR booking:

• 12 pm check in (subject to availability)
• A room upgrade upon arrival (subject to availability)
• A daily breakfast for two
• $100 room credit towards eligible charges (which may include food and beverage, spa, or other on-property charges – eligible charges vary by property)
• Guaranteed 4pm check-out

You’ll find the full search results in a table at the end of this article, so the table below just shows the key data.

• A red number shows where an Amex FHR booking would have been $50+/night more expensive than booking directly with the hotel.
• A yellow number shows where an Amex FHR booking would have been between $25 and $50/night more expensive than booking directly with the hotel.
• A green number shows where an Amex FHR booking would have been no more than $25/night more expensive than booking directly with the hotel (a green number in brackets indicates that booking with Amex would have been cheaper than booking directly with the hotel).

A key thing to keep in mind as you view the data is this:

In all but one instance, Amex Travel only offered fully flexible rates at the properties I selected. In some cases, the chains and/or properties offered fully flexible rates and a cheaper less flexible rate.

If you’re only interested in booking a flexible rate, the column you should focus on below is the second from the right (“difference/night flexible rates“).

If you would be prepared to book a rate that requires full prepayment or a rate that has a relatively harsh cancellation policy, the column you should focus on below is the one on the far right (“difference/night Amex best rate v Hotel best rate“).

In summary:

When comparing flexible rates, an FHR booking through Amex Travel was:

• Cheaper than booking direct in 2 out of 20 instances.
• The same price as booking direct in 7 out of 20 instances.
• Between $1 and $25 more expensive per night than booking direct in 7 out of 20 instances.
• Between $25 and $50 more expensive per night than booking direct in 2 out of 20 instances.
• Over $50 more expensive per night than booking direct in 2 out of 20 instances.

When comparing Amex FHR rates and the cheapest rate being offered by the property, an FHR booking through Amex Travel was:

• Cheaper than booking direct in 2 out of 20 instances.
• The same price as booking direct in 5 out of 20 instances.
• Between $1 and $25 more expensive per night than booking direct in 2 out of 20 instances.
• Between $25 and $50 more expensive per night than booking direct in 0 out of 20 instances.
• Over $50 more expensive per night than booking direct in 11 out of 20 instances.

There were a few nuances within the results that may make a difference to the way some people may view them, so for the sake of completeness, here they are:

1. Most of the rates offered by the properties didn’t include breakfast, but breakfast was included at the Kempinski Berlin, at the Capella Shanghai, and at the Saxon Hotel in Cape Town.
2. At the One&Only Cape Town, the hotel’s flexible rate allowed cancellations up to 24 hours before check-in while the Amex Travel rate required a guest to give 7 days notice if they wanted to cancel with a 1-night penalty and no-refund was offered if the booking was cancelled within 7-days of check-in.
3. At the Four Seasons Buenos Aires, Amex FHR didn’t have access to a 1-King bed room (only a Twin room was available) while a 1-King bed room was available when booking directly.
4. Someone with access to the Hyatt Leverage rate could have saved a further $15/night when booking the Park Hyatt Chicago with Hyatt and that would see Amex Travel charging over $50 more per night than Hyatt.

Thoughts

The results surprised me as I didn’t expected Amex FHR to come out of this looking as good as I think it has done.

Of course, a selection of 20 properties isn’t big enough to form a statistically material sample size, but I still think that the results give a reasonable (albeit general) insight into how the FHR prices you’ll find on Amex Travel compare to the prices you’ll find if booking with hotels directly.

The results show that at 16 out of the 20 properties I checked, the flexible Amex FHR price was within $25 of the flexible nightly price offered by the direct booking channels.

Given that the Amex FHR bookings guarantee a 4pm late check-out, breakfast for two, and a $100 room credit of some kind (most of which aren’t offered as standard when booking direct), and keeping in mind that Amex FHR bookings are eligible for elite status benefits and that they’ll earn a guest loyalty points if they’re a member of the hotel’s rewards program, that seems pretty good to me.

I’d happily pay up to $25 more/night just to have a guaranteed 4pm check out (if my elite status didn’t give that to me already), so imagine how I feel about also being given breakfast and a $100 room credit for that small premium as well 🙂

The story is a little different when we move away from the flexible rate v flexible rate comparison.

If you’re happy to book a non-flexible rate, the results show that you may be able to save quite a bit of money by avoiding Amex Travel and booking directly with the chains/hotels.

At some of the most famous properties in the list (the Four Seasons George V and the Hotel Eden in Rome), you could save between $315 and $396 per night by booking a non-flexible rate vs the best rate that Amex Travel was offering, and if you don’t care about flexibility, that’s going to be a huge saving for you.

For most of the remaining properties, the value to booking a flexible rate with Amex Travel vs booking a non-flexible rate directly with the hotel/chain will center on three things:

1. How much value a guest places on the Amex FHR benefits
2. How many nights the booking is for (the FHR $100 room credit benefit could wipe out most of the price difference on a 1-night stay, but wouldn’t make much of a difference on a 7-night stay)
3. If the guest places any value at all on having some flexibility vs no flexibility

When it comes to flexible bookings v flexible bookings, Amex Travel looks like it will probably the best way to book most of the time with not much thought needed to come to that decision.

When it comes to flexible bookings vs non-flexible bookings, there more to think about and the results suggest that at least 50% of the time the decision will ultimately come down to how much value a guest puts on the added benefits that an Amex FHR reservation offers.

Bottom line

Based on the relatively small sample that I’ve used, I would suggest that for anyone who likes to keep their hotel bookings flexible, the hotel credits that come as part of the Platinum Card’s benefits package could be put to excellent use by booking Fine Hotels & Resorts properties through Amex Travel as, on the whole, Amex Travel’s FHR pricing isn’t significantly higher than the pricing you’ll find when booking directly with a hotel or a chain.

If you’re comfortable booking non-flexible rates, however, there’s more to think about and while paying more/night for the FHR rate may still make sense in a number of scenarios, it’s not as clear a decision as it is when comparing the flexible rates.

Have you been using Amex Travel to search for rates at FHR properties? What have your experiences been like?

Note: As promised, here’s the full set of FHR search results in tabular form: