Last May, I signed up my wife for an offer for the American Express Premier Rewards Gold card. The offer was for 50,000 Membership Reward points (instead of the usual 25,000). At the same time, my brother and mother also signed up for it. The points posted with no problem and that was that.
A couple of months later, many people who had signed up for that offer began to receive an additional 40,000 points. My mother and brother were two of those people who received them while my did not get any extra points. I didn’t want to jeopardize my brother and mother losing their points because I called to ask about my wife’s points so I just let it go. When the card came up for renewal this year, I downgraded it to the American Express Blue Sky card since there was no annual fee and I could keep the account open. After doing that, my wife received $100 statement credit because that was the current offer for the card for new applicants – an extra bonus I was not expecting!
Ok, so why am I so thankful to American Express now? I got home to a letter from them yesterday that said this:
Dear __________
We have enclosed a check for the cash value of 40,000 Membership Reward points.
You should have received these points with the promotional offer you redeemed when you spent $500
in the first three months of Cardmembership. Due to a system error, we were unable to award these
Membership Reward points before you card was cancelled. We apologize for any inconvenience this
may have caused.
I was curious what they placed as the value for Membership Reward points when paid out to the customer. I know that you can get gift cards for different retailers for around 12,000 points = $100 gift card and also know that you can purchase the points from them for $0.025 each. I figured they would have sent a check for $300 or so – I know, I could have flipped the check over right away and just looked, but I like trying to figure these things out first. 🙂
I looked at the check and found that they placed the value at $0.02 per point – in other words, $800! Could I have gotten better value out of that by using the points with an airline? Sure, but to get that after the fact is really, really nice! It is really great of American Express to actually initiate something like this without any type of communication from me. I mean, this was about 14 months ago. So, Thank You, American Express!!!
Something that was at the bottom of the letter was this program was managed by American Express Travel Related Services Consulting, Inc, with assistance from RUST Consulting, Inc. RUST Consulting, Inc, is a program administrator retained by American Express for this purpose. I know that American Express had to pay a lot in penalties and lawsuits recently for deceptive marketing, so maybe this is them trying to work harder at dotting i’s and crossing t’s. In any case, I guess we just got a nice Christmas gift from American Express!
