Hey credit Warriors! Today we have an interesting topic for you: It seems that American Express is offering some card members downgrade bonuses, to actually downgrade their cards and get a bonus. Yes, you heard that correctly. Normally it’s a welcome bonus or an upgrade bonus but this is the opposite.
What exactly are these NEW Amex Downgrade bonuses?
In a recent post on Reddit Anex Platinum to Gold downgrade offer 25,000 points for $1,000 in spend in 3 months. This was during cancellation at the third annual fee after the retention offer at the second annual fee. So to break that down for those who aren’t so familiar with the credit card lingo, basically, this person phoned up to cancel his Amex Platinum card, maybe hoping for a retention offer. He had had a retention offer on his second year and this was his third year, his third annual fee with the card. It’s unlikely to get a retention offer two years in a row but during the cancellation process, the rep offered him to downgrade to the Amex Gold card for a bonus of $25,000 Amex points for spending $1,000 on the gold card in 3 months.
This guy actually denied the offer but he himself says that may not have been wise because of the new family language in the terms and conditions on the Amex Gold Card. You may not be able to get a Gold card bonus if you’ve had the Amex Platinum before which this guy had.
So this actually makes sense that if no one who had the Platinum can get a bonus on the Gold anymore, which would be like 60,000 points, so a better deal for the customer to refuse the downgrade offer if there’s a chance you can get the bonus of 60,000 points or more depending on the link or a referral but Amex could be a bit more generous by offering a downgrade offer of 25,000 points because then they get to not give 60,000 and they can give 20,000 – 25,000 on a downgrade offer instead. It’s less points for them.
How to Get Amex Downgrade Bonus
If you want to try and get this offer, you can phone up and cancel your platinum but you do actually have to be mentally ready to cancel your Platinum. I wouldn’t say just bluff and do this if you don’t really want to cancel. The guy on Reddit said that he also had the business Platinum so he was doubled up on some benefits anyway. If you just had the personal Platinum Card it might still be useful to you so you might not want to do this. Anyway, you phone up and you say you want to cancel and if they offer you a downgrade to the Gold without the bonus decline. Initially, that’s what this guy did and then they may, and I stress may, follow up with a downgrade bonus offer. Just remember nothing is guaranteed. That’s how you do it in theory and you might get the Amex downgrade bonus.
Automatically Activate All of Your Amex Offers
If you have Amex cards, you might find MaxRewards especially useful because it has a function to automatically activate all of your Amex offers for you so you never miss a deal. MaxRewards is a great way to keep track of data on all your credit cards from different banks in one place.
The free version of the app gives you transaction balance points and reward balances all in one dashboard and has useful things like a welcome bonus spending track.
If you get MaxRewards Gold, the pro version of the app, you get the function where MaxRewards will activate all of your Amex offers for you! You may even use an Amex offer without realizing it and come home to an email saying that you save money. That’s happened to me several times and when you activate all your Amex offers new offers appear in your account that you never even knew existed and MaxRewards will activate them too. You can get a free month of MaxRewards gold with my affiliate code: shifu. Or just download the app and check out the free features.
Other Great Bonuses
If you’re just looking for some cash back, check out this video that covers new awesome cash bonuses.
