Tag: Amex

What Airport Lounges Can You Get Into With The American Express (AMEX) Platinum Card?

The American Express (AMEX) Platinum card is designed for the jet setter crowd. While the personal Platinum card carries a steep $550 annual fee, if you want to learn more about the benefits of the Platinum card, you can check out our full review HERE.  While the card is marketed to those who can afford the luxury items advertised in the Departures magazine that’s included with your card membership, many benefits of the Platinum card can help travelers who aren’t in the top 0.01 percent. One of those benefits is access to several different types of airport club lounges. It can be hard to keep track of which lounges the card will get you into and the requirements for each, thus the need for this post. To clarify, access to lounges is a perk of the Personal Platinum, Business Platinum and variants of these cards.

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Heads up that other American Express Cards with platinum in the name, like the Delta Airlines Platinum or Optima Platinum, don’t get the same lounge access.

American Express does have a very handy lounge locator on their website. If you type in the airport, they’ll tell you all the places you can get into and which type of lounge that location is. If you have several lounges at an airport to choose from, here’s a link to our article about a website that provides reviews of over 2,500 lounges in 850+ airports worldwide.

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Is It Possible To Have Too Many Free Hotel Nights?

I realize it’s a total #firstworldproblem to be complaining about having too many hotel free night certificates. But I just can’t ignore the fact that by the end of the year, Sharon and I will be getting seven free nights from the various hotel credit cards that we have. When we had one, two or even three of these certificates a year, it was easy to burn them on a quick weekend getaway, like when I used one during my visit New Jersey for my class reunion.

But seven?

So I’m starting to wonder if I need to pare back my hotel credit cards. I mean, if the only reason I’m keeping a card is for a free night and I can’t use the free night, the card isn’t worth it anymore. Not to mention that if I’m limiting myself to a specific hotel chain to use a free night certificate, I might be missing out on staying at a better location because I don’t want to waste a free night. That’s the reason I don’t care about loyalty – I don’t want to be hooked to a specific brand because of a credit card certificate.

Here’s a list of the cards I have that provide a yearly free night certificate as a benefit:

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Sometimes It Pays To Admit When You’ve Made A Mistake

You know the feeling that you needed to do something but just can’t quite remember what it is? I had that feeling for the last three days of my business trip. It wasn’t until I arrived back home that I found out what I was forgetting to do.

Pay my World of Hyatt credit card bill.
Chase Bank Branch
I’m usually organized with these things but lately I’ve forgotten a payment until a day or two after so I’ve started to set up an automatic minimum payment every month just in case I forget. That way, I’ll just need to pay the interest charge. It’s not what I want to do but it’s better than having to pay a late fee, as well.
Back to the story at hand. The World of Hyatt card is a newer card for me and I didn’t set up automatic payment yet AND I forgot put the payment in my spreadsheet. Oops!
There are several things you need to do when this happens:

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Why You Need To Diversify Your Miles and Points Portfolio

As you may have read, we had a blowout trip through the American Southwest in 2017. For us, a fifteen night trip is an amazingly long time to be away from home. We could have stayed at the same hotel chain properties and worked our way towards some low level of status. However, it was much better for us to pick the best hotel for us in each location and use the most sensible form of payment, be it paying cash or using points. The same thing went for the flights, which were booked with a combination of cash and airline miles.

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This was possible because I had a stash of points in several hotel programs as well as had transferrable credit card points. Some of the rooms I paid for because the hotels either weren’t part of any point program or there was a promotion that made paying with cash a much better value than using points.

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