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Almost exactly a month ago, American Express published a number of targeted spending offers for holders of its business cards and as a targeted cardholder, I could see the same offer listed under two of my cards.
As the offer wasn’t particularly rewarding and as I didn’t want to trigger the offer’s 90-day usage period until I actually had some spending to put on one of my targeted cards, I didn’t add the offer to either card and I left it sitting in my ‘available offers’ list.
This morning, that offer no longer appears in my account (despite the fact that it was valid though the end of the year) and it has been replaced by a similar offer that could be far more useful.
The change in offers
The offer that I was originally targeted for back in September was giving me 2,500 bonus points for spending $9,000 or more on my targeted card (up to 3 times).
Given that TFM values Membership Rewards Points at 1.5 cents each (based on the value that we know that we can get out of them with relative ease), this deal was offering me an added incentive worth just $37.50 for putting $9,000 of spending on my Blue Business® Plus Credit Card from American Express or my Business Platinum Card® from American Express.
Unsurprisingly, I didn’t find that very tempting.
Today, however, this is the offer that appears on the same two cards with the original offer nowhere to be seen:
The bonus being offered has been cut to 2,000 points but the spending required to trigger that bonus has been cut to just $4,000 and that makes this a more interesting proposition.
Thoughts
I could view this new offer as an incentive of $30 for $4,000 of spending or, if I link it to my Blue Business® Plus Credit Card, I could view it as an opportunity to earn 2.5 points/dollar on $4,000 of spending up to 3 times (the Blue Business® Plus Credit Card from American Express ordinarily earns cardholders 2 points/dollar on up to $50,000 of eligible spending per year – terms apply).
Looking at this offer in terms of the effective cash bonus makes it look very dull, but in terms of potential earnings on what would otherwise be unbonused spending, I quite like the idea of earning 2.5 Membership Rewards Points per dollar.
Obviously, the earning rate would remain at 2 points per dollar for all spending under $4,000, but as long as I can be sure that I’ll hit the $4,000 target within the 90-day window that the offer gives me, that shouldn’t be an issue.
The key thing that interests me here, however, isn’t the bonus but the fact that by not adding the original offer to any of my cards, I appear to have inadvertently persuaded Amex to improve the terms of the offer considerably.
I wasn’t aware that this ever happened.
To be clear, the terms of the original offer stated that it had to be added to a targeted card by 31 December 2024 and that the spending target had to be met within 90 days of the offer being added to a card, so there’s nothing in the terms and conditions that would explain why one month after it appeared in my account (and with over two months left to run), it has been removed and replaced with an alternative.
In the past, I’ve usually just blindly added all offers to my cards whether or not I planned to use them, but given what appears to have happened today, I’ll probably hold back from adding any uninteresting spending offers to my cards in the future just in case Amex decides to sweeten the deal a few weeks later.
Bottom line
Amex appears to have replaced a targeted spending offer that has been sitting in my account for almost exactly a month with a noticeably better offer that I’m much more likely to use.
Having never seen an Amex spending offer change like this before, this has caught me by surprise, but I would be interested to know if any TFM readers have also seen this happen and if they have, how long did it take for the offer to change and was the new offer any better?
