American Express Platinum card review 

You *might* be able to hit that bonus by the end of May and then get this one!!

Hope it makes it easy to compare to the other options

Yes, but I don't think it's very comprehensive. It's something you should not rely on. I just bought travel insurance today for £85 for the year, it was quite comprehensive. I feel a lot more peace of mind with the paid travel insurance, rather than the American Express insurance.

No you won’t

Sadly not!

@Julian FP did you manage to find out how good these 20% discounts are? I am also in a similar situation and so these savings would be huge for me, but there's no way to actually browse the offers unless you're a platinum card holder

@@piotrrutkowski458 Hi Piotr. Yes I did. The only way that I could get a look at the platinum prices was to get a card so I did since I can always cancel it at any time and get a pro-rata refund of the unused annual fee. It's early days, I've had the card for about 10 days, but I immediately ran a few comparisons against publicly available prices. One example was a first class BA return between London(LHR) and New York(JFK). Regular price £4,950 on the BA web site when I did my search vs the platinum discounted price of ..... wait for it ...... £4,900! That's a discount of 1.01%! I did slightly better with a return Emirates first class between London and Cape Town, via Dubai obviously, and that was £7,164.36 on the Emirates web site vs £6,830.36 for the Amex Platinum price so that's a 4.66% discount and an actual saving of £334 which in fairness does pay over half of the annual fee (I did actually book that flight). But... I also compared those prices with prices on various search engines and in both cases I could have got better prices than the Amex ones by taking one of those deals, e.g. Kayak was showing a £6,776.00 price for the Cape Town tickets but it was via an agent I didn't know. Personally I get nervous chasing deals via small online travel agents so I always book my flights directly with the airline or Amex Travel. If you're someone who is happy going with the smaller agents to get the best prices then based on my experiences so far I doubt you'll save a single penny, for me however it does allow me to access the sort of prices seen on price comparison sites while being able to book through an agent I trust (Amex). I plan to keep the card for at least a few more months, maybe I've just been unlucky and haven't seen the better deals yet, but so far it does look as if it might be as I originally feared and in reality discounts anywhere close to the claimed 20% upper limit are pretty much impossible to find. Sorry not to have better news for you at this stage. If you want me to run a search on some specific flights then let me know.

@@julianfp1952 Thank you - doesn't sound great for the advertised "up to 20%" however a saving of around £200/£300 per flight on even a few flights a year would still offset the 575 annual fee so it does sound like it may be worth a shot. I also agree that I'd rather book it with a trusted retailer like amex travel or the airline themselves as opposed to smaller agents (also because I've had bad experiences with sites like Kayak in the past). Thanks again for the information, v useful :)

Yeah, it’s a bonus only card in my option, and spend elsewhere for ongoing points

Really hard to answer these types of questions because it could be any number of things. One possibility is the popularity of each card. The gold card is more popular (because its cheaper and easier to get the most bonuses from) so therefore more people are applying for it, 4.5 people out of 10 will get this card because people with good, average and bad credit are all probably interested (and Andy has probably increased its popularity to many people not previously interested in American express). The platinum card is more expensive and more exclusive and less people are applying for it, and the type of people interested in this card are probably a better quality of customer (higher credit score, higher income etc...) therefore most people actually interested in applying for this card are more likely to be approved, hence the 9/10 chance. Again this is absolutely just a generalisation as there are probably thousands of other reasons, but something to think about.

@@samc12345 decent thank you! I currently have a Santander credit card and I feel I can get more bonus’ with American Express. Weird because golf card says 90% allowed on ClearScore… so weird I honestly have no clue! Thank you for the info I really appreciate it :)

Not if you use allthe benefits tactically. It can benefit you as well.

Yeah, just click a link that says something like “see all cards”