AMEX claws back my Hilton bonus points

News went around on July 4 of how AMEX clawed back the Hilton 12X grocery bonus points promo. I’ll detail what happened to me. My May 15th statement ended like this:

Almost exactly 7 weeks later, my Hilton account updated with this:

It seems they gave me 12K points and looking back at my statement, I realized that’s because I spent 4K at a Wal-mart that didn’t code as grocery, so it only earned 3X. All of the grocery spend was like it never even happened, kinda like when you buy GCs at Simon.

So what now? Am I mad? NO. Am I going to sue them? NO. They’ve always had exclusions of not paying out points for gift cards, and they finally decided to enforce the t&c. I guess I’m just happy they didn’t wipe out my accounts. What did this cost me? I calculated it cost me about $450 in VGC and liquidation fees, not to mention my time and effort and naturally the opportunity cost of using a 2-3% card. This of course doesn’t include a bigger June statement and residual July spend so far. Guess I should be happy they told us now so I can stop spending in July.

It’ll be interesting to see if the Gold will still earn 4X at grocery – my guess is YES since it’s capped. More interesting will be if Aspire will still earn 6X going forward – I’m leaning NO but we’ll see. Either way, I’ll put the Hilton card back in the sock drawer. Can’t wait for those 1 million Hilton signup bonus points offers down the road cuz ain’t no one is going to MS on this card going forward. Good riddance to it like the Bonvoy card!

9 comments on “AMEX claws back my Hilton bonus points

  1. Like everyone else I had a major clawback – now that we are post 12X – has anyone done gift cards and gotten the regular 6X?

  2. Can you please tell me how I can see how my Hilton points are added /accumulating. I logged in to my account. I can see my total points but I wanted to see the additions. I Clicked on several of the headers without luck. Thank you for your assistance.

    1. Once you’re logged onto the desktop site, u can go to the ‘activity’ tab in the top and filter to all activities.

  3. I really wish they get some smart people at Amex. Instead of this sh*tshow around clawbacks, they should just not make offers they cannot keep or cap it to limit their exposure. Win-win for everyone.

    1. Think it from their perspective. They still got all the swipe fees without having to pay the points. Basically they made MS-ers work for them for free!

      1. I don’t think they were nefarious enough to intentionally do this to MS’ers. I’m sure they had an arbitrary limit of $10K of spend at grocery that they’d pay out. Then they noticed people doing massive numbers and decided it was better to not pay out to the 0.1% of people even though I’m sure they accounted for at least 10% of grocery spend that month. So I’m sure they made the decision after the fact.

    2. Or think about it from your perspective. If all the companies employed really smart people and they properly analyzed L3 data and properly enforced restrictions are card application dates, cancelled accounts for people with breakout spend, etc etc then the hobby you care about would be dead.

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