As the summer holiday season is around the corner, credit card companies are coming up with lucrative offers to make your international travel more rewarding. Here’s one of the offer from American Express worth exploring,
Offer Details
- Offer: Additional 5X bonus Reward points on all international spends (both online & offline) with Amex cards
- Excluded cards: Payback & Jet Cards
- Eligibility: You need to book an international flight or hotel as per this offer.
- Offer reward rate: 6% – markup fee = 2%
- Max cap: Nil
- Fulfilment: August 31, 2019
As as you can see, this offer is actually a kind of Add-on offer that comes with the hotel/flights campaign for summer 2019 but i consider it in the reverse 🙂
Even the Intl hotel offer of 30% is pretty good. That reminds me of the days when i used Amex MMT Hotel offer to book a trip to vietnam for Rs.3700
How much could you save?
As most Amex cards gives 1MR Point per Rs.50, with this promo,
- You get 1+5=6 MR Points for every Rs.50 spent
- That turns to 12 Points per Rs.100 and as I value 1Mr=0.50 Ps, this turns to 6% returns on Intl spend.
Now, as markup fee on Amex is 3.5%+GST, you get net savings of about 2% which is pretty good i should say.
This is an amazing offer for sure, but the fact that you could get this only when you book flights/hotels on certain dates makes it more complicated. I rather wish they had made it eligible just with any txn on MMT.
Well, the obvious question now is, what happens to the Amex Plat Charge card as it has 3X points inbuilt benefit on intl spends. Well, its EXCLUDED from this 5X promo.
Bottomline
Finally it’s good to see Amex started to reward more on international spends. Hope it gets better in future. That aside, acceptance might be an issue for some if you’re not spending at premium locations.
Just incase you donot hold an Amex card, you can still get Amex Platinum Travel Card for free using this link. Forget about just “FREE” card, it actually pays you to get the card, because you get 2K bonus points+ 2k amazon vouchers when you apply for supplementary cards. Ideally you get free card + Rs.3k worth of points and vouchers. Cool isn’t it?
So what’s your take on this AMEX international spends offer? Feel free to drop your thoughts in the comments below.
Any link for the offer?
It is there in the article already 🙂
But every MR point is Rs. 0.25 in general.
Only for special deployments like plat travel MR points used for Spicejet voucher give value of 0.5
Well, my preferred way of transfer is Marriott Points, so it varies from person to person. But even with 18k/24k Gold collection, you could get Rs. 0.40.
Can you transfer points from Membership Rewards Credit Card (basis version )card to Marriot ?
Well the gap between the flight offer and 5x offer is quite high.
Coincidentally I booked a trip today morning from mmt using the flight offer ( unaware of 5x offer), but sadly my trip end on 30th April. So I don’t get the benefit of 5x.
Quite a strange structuring of the offer.
That’s true. Its pretty tough to time the trip 2+ month prior. Maybe that’s why they got very much generous this time 😀
American Express details
Offer Details:Earn 5X MR points on booking domestic flights and 15X MR points on prepaid domestic and international hotel bookings on American Express Domestic Travel website for select cards.
MR Earn Rate on Plat 2.5MRs/100
Offer Period:Valid till 31st March, 2019.
Valid on Centurion and Plat Charge
Where is the 30% discount hotel offer ?? I couldn’t find any Siddharth
Pls check the links in article. It has all info with T&C of the offer.
I don’t think Plat will double dip. Although I’ll ask and confirm it here.
The way you get 3X on Plat is you get 2X points as bonus points. I don’t think they will process 2 bonueses. The higher of 2 offers should apply. But I’ll confirm.
The T&C’s clearly exclude Platinum Charge.
Nice find 🙂
Updated.