Business Express Airlines Puns

With the publicity surrounding the 100,000 Membership Rewards signup offer on the American Express Business Platinum Card, there’s been a lot of buzz about the 50% Airline Bonus this card offers. I've finally written up my thoughts on this subject (I've been ruminating about it for a month or so, after seeing TPG's awful post on the subject). I figured cross-posting here was a good way to get people thinking about how this actually works. This is mostly just a copy/paste from my DoC article with some re-formatting, a link is available at the end of this post.

How Does It Work?

The basic gist is that if you use Pay with Points, you get 50% of the Membership Rewards (MR) points you spend back as a rebate, which sounds too good to be true—2 cents per points on cash fares!—and it is if you dig deeper.

This is not to say that the 50% Airline Bonus isn’t very good—it is!—but rather that its value is not all that it appears to be.

Caveat #1 – Program Structure

The first caveat is twofold: you must use Pay with Points on an eligible fare to get 50% of your MR back. Obviously, to use Pay with Points, you must use the American Express Travel portal and cannot book directly through an airline. What is an eligible fare?

• First and Business Class tickets with all airlines available with American Express Travel.
• Any fare class with your selected qualifying airline (the airline for which you’ve chosen to receive your $200 Airline Fee Credit).

This means that you cannot get a 50% Airline Bonus on just any fare—and unless you are in the habit of paying cash for first & business class travel, your options are restricted to the airline you’ve selected for the Airline Fee Credit. If you regularly fly out of a hub such as ATL, this can work out quite well for you (although to book fares on Southwest, you have to call in, which is an annoyance). If you aren’t flying out of a hub, this caveat can be very limiting—different carriers will be cheaper for different routes, and this restricts your ability to shop around.

While it still may make sense for non-hub flyers to buy a $300 fare with Pay with Points on their qualifying airline, over a $270 fare with cash on the cheapest airline, wider spreads in price trash your equivalent cpp. If you redeem 30k points for a $300 fare on your qualifying airline (with a 50% Airline Bonus of 15,000 MR points) instead of buying a cash fare at $250, the 15,000 MR for t

Some people cannot comprehend that not everyone wants a business. Some people genuinely just want to show up, do their work, make a nice enough income to support themselves/family, and go the fuck home.

"Oh? You're tired of being exploited? Well pull a business out of your butt and go exploit other people instead!"

Fully ignoring that not everyone has the means to do that and not everyone WANTS to. It's fucking exhausting. We don't need 40 shitty coffee shops on one block just because Starbucks pays like shit. How will you hire anybody to run your half-assed business if everyone takes your advice and fucks off to start an etsy?

Obviously, it's not a good faith argument. It's just a deflection so we don't try to alter the status quo and actually treat workers better. It just pisses me off.

Edit: Trying my best to respond to comments! Thank you to everyone for engaging and for those offering their own small business perspectives 😊

She only had a Coach bag.