Back in September 2021, AMEX had an upgrade offer of upgrading your personal GREEN to GOLD and after $1K spend, you earned 15K points. So I did that and got the 15K bonus points. Then in November, I upgraded the GOLD to PLAT and after $2K spend, I’d earn 25K points as well as earning 10X on up to $15K at certain places. So I did that and got the 25K bonus points.
Fast forward to last week and me realizing I don’t want to hold onto the card as PLAT for the year and wanting the grocery spend, decided to downgrade the PLAT card to GOLD. I expected them to claw back the 25K points but I wasn’t sure about the 10X spend (150K points.) Then yesterday, I get this email from AMEX:
I logged into my MR account and saw this:
So it seems that not only did they take away the GOLD -> PLAT 25K bonus, they also took away the 15K GREEN -> GOLD bonus which is odd since I’m back to being GOLD. I’m sure their system is just detecting if there was ANY downgrade on the card, then they’d remove the bonus. On the bright side, they didn’t claw back the 150K points from the 10X spend. I guess I’m okay with this since a) I can use up the GOLD grocery spend NOW vs waiting until November to do the calendar spend, b) I still kept the 150K spend bonus and c) I do plan on downgrading this GOLD to GREEN pretty soon here, so I’ll save about $450 in annual fees, so I essentially chose $450 instead of 45K points.
Do you think same claw back would happen with upgrades? Got a 20k retention bonus on Gold in December, and was sent upgrade offer to Plat this month. Briefly recall they said I had to keep the Gold for a year, but they were also the ones that sent the upgrade offer via email.
upgrades are fine since they didn’t claw back the 15K bonus when i upgraded the gold to plat