Don’t waste your time with these Amex Platinum Benefits

The American Express Platinum charge card is known for its impressive suite of benefits and the whopping £575 annual fee. To rationalise the annual fee, we continually evaluate the benefits from which we’ve, well, benefited. If the value we’ve had doesn’t eclipse the annual fee, we’d be cancelling.

Every time we review our card membership, there are always those so-called benefits that leave us scratching our head. The PriorityPass membership and Hilton Gold status are high-value benefits that payback. On the other hand, we’ve found some benefits are barely worth mentioning, let alone trying to redeem. To save you the hassle, we’d recommend you don’t waste your time with these Amex Platinum benefits:

Status with Avis or Hertz

Unlike the hotel status benefits, registering status membership with the two car rental partners is a waste of time in more ways than one.

Registration hell

The first reason not not to bother is the pain of registering for the benefit. After being redirected to either an Avis or Hertz landing page, you’ll be asked for a worrisome amount of personal information, including your driving licence number. Once completed, you’ll either hit an error page, or be told they will be in touch in a few days. You never hear from them again.

Customer care couldn’t care less

If you get an error on on of the application forms, like we did, you’ll have to contact customer care. We called and were passed from department to department by entirely disinterested staff. We gave up after being cut off twice, and finally being told we should register in person at a car rental location.

Glorified loyalty programs that don’t pay

There will be frequent renters who’ll argue otherwise, but these car hire benefits are just hollow marketing tools to get you signed-up to a car rental company’s loyalty programme. The joke is, you can sign-up to these schemes without an Amex Platinum card. The “preferential” treatment you’ll receive for the average booking will be nothing compared to the savings you could make through one of the car hire aggregation website. You’re in the club, but you’ll most likely pay more online and get royally fleeced in location. Few travel-savvy Amex Platinum cardholders pay “published” or “standard” rates, so 15% off that price is hardly a deal.

For the amount of information they ask you to hand over during enrolment, Avis and Hertz should be offering way more in perks.

Addison Lee statement credit

This UK taxi firm operates in the following large cities: London, Bristol, Birmingham, Cambridge, Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Milton Keynes, Swansea, Stoke On Trent, Portsmouth, Nottingham, Newcastle. If you’re not located around them, you’re not going to get much use from the offer. If you are, keep reading.

Before Uber and Bolt landed in these cities, Addison Lee was the de-facto market leader. They use trademark black people carriers and, at the time, we’re considered smarter than a local mini-cab and less expensive than a black cab.

An expensive Uber

So why not bother? In short, they’re 30% more expensive than Uber and you don’t really get more for your money. A £10 journey with Uber will cost you £15+ with Addison Lee.

Drivers no better than Uber

When we tried to use this offer, we requested a pick-up at a major London railway station. The driver arrived late and in the wrong place. From several streets away, he phoned to ask how to get to the station. After working out where he was, we used Google Maps to give him turn-by-turn directions to front of the station.

We found out after the journey ended that we’d been charged a waiting time for the period we were directing the driver to our location.

No matter what anyone says about Uber drivers, we’ve not had one like that!

Inconsistent customer service

Getting the error on the waiting charge corrected required us to further chase the promised refund when it failed to materialise. 1 email and 2 separate phone calls to correct their mistake.

Why bother with all that for an effective £5 saving on the cost of a taxi?!

So, now you know, be sure that you don’t waste your time with these Amex Platinum benefits. Of course you might enjoy admin or handing your details to loyalty programmes for nothing. In which case, go for it!

Tell us what you think

Is there an Amex Platinum benefit you love or loathe? Let us know why in the comments below.