A letter (how quaint) arrived from American Express this week inviting me to apply for a platinum card.
I had an ordinary Amex card in the 1980s and I admit at the time I rather liked the idea.
But then I discovered it wasn't widely accepted, and it cost £15 a year, so I binned it.
Does anyone still use Amex cards?
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I did have a Lloyds/TSB Amex a few years ago....3% cashback first 3 months, up to a max of £100 if I remember correctly, then I stopped using it. Not really worth the bother.
When I had my own retail business I did not accept Amex, nor do the two other retailers I have subsequently worked for.
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...3% cashback first 3 months...
The introductory offer is first year's card free, thereafter £25 a year.
Plus 5% cashback on up to £2,000 of purchases in the first three months, thereafter 1.25% cashback.
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I still have mine, but never use it. Standard green for me now, as I never used the extras with the platinum. It's my only back up credit card now, since dumping the rest.
Only problem I have is the PIN is a strange number, and to change it I have to use a UK ATM, and I hardly ever go to the UK. No other way to change it to something more memorable, it seems. So even though it's my emergency card, will probably be useless as I doubt I'll remember the PIN.
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Dumped my corporate Amex card on my bosses desk when I retired, no intention of getting another. Ok for car hire, flights and hotels, utterly useless for anything else
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I used to use one ( again corporately issued ) back in the '80s when my job involved a fair amount of travel to both North and South America. "British"credit cards like Access and Barclaycard were not widely accepted there at that time. Conversely, the Amex card took a while to gain acceptance here. I'm fairly sure the balance had to be paid in full every month so it wasn't strictly speaking a credit card but I think it was instead referred to as a "charge" card.
Not felt any need for one since the wordwide development and acceptance of Visa and Mastercards.
I only use two now. One for work and one for play. Always pay off the full balance on both every month so it's more of a way of having a visual record of my spending and the transactional security they provide.
Last edited by: Humph D'Bout on Sat 1 Sep 12 at 09:35
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I still occasionally see signs saying visa and mastercard accepted, but not amex.
I assume they charge the retailer a higher rate or are tardy in coughing up.
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>> I assume they charge the retailer a higher rate or are tardy in coughing up.
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Yes, and they have to be specially set up for the card-reader, and they don't appear on the ordinary provider statement but have to have their very own special reconciliation.
Pain in the neck - we don't take them.
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...Ok for car hire, flights and hotels, utterly useless for anything else...
That was my impression when I lived in London, fine if your life involved international travel and staying in the five star hotels in the West End.
Not much use for me on the tube and staying in a bedsit in Chiswick.
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>> Does anyone still use Amex cards?
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Priceless, on those occasions when your Mastercard and Visa providers block your card overseas despite having told them that you are going abroad.
But then Iffy does not go abroad beyond oopNorth except maybe venturing to London once this century.
;-)
Last edited by: John H on Sat 1 Sep 12 at 10:36
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...But then Iffy does not go abroad...
You got that right.
One only has to look at the numbers of people desperate to get into this country to realise 'abroad' isn't all it's cracked up to be.
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>> ...But then Iffy does not go abroad...
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>> You got that right.
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>> One only has to look at the numbers of people desperate to get into this
>> country to realise 'abroad' isn't all it's cracked up to be.
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In the main, people do not go abroad because they want to live there. You visited London recently, did you not? I visited Wolverhampton and Dudley last week. I bet neither of us did so because we wanted to live there.
Humans explore the universe, send robots to Mars, go to the moon if they can.
You only have one life. My philosophy is that, if you can afford the time and/or the expense, then you should try to see as much of the earth with your own eyes.
The expense is something that you can mitigate to a great extent. For me, time is the limiting factor.
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I think the world of Amex isn't the same as ours. They seem to operate in that strange netherworld of airport hotel rooms, brand names and international TV news channels full of ads telling viewers how amazing they are.
My brother's girlfriend, a lovely person who is something very senior in Amex, was here a couple of weeks ago and kindly gave me a bottle of bubbly with bits of real gold floating in it. I kid you not. I drank it of course.
But I don't think she was hugely impressed by my 'waiter's friend' corkscrew with the Amex logo on it that I picked up at a car boot sale.
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then you should try to see as much of the earth with your own eyes.
You don`t even have to travel nowadays to do that! - Virtual travel with Google-Earth and Street-view is just as good! and it takes the guess-work out of it, you can check the place out before you book it! - Brill!
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Had one for the free air miles for a year, got rid of it. Worked in about 5% of places I tried it. Only regular use was for diesel at the local filling station where I intensely disliked the owner and wanted to make sure they earned the least profit from me.
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Had an Company AMEX charge card 25-30 yrs ago - air tickets and some hotels but declined most places. Made redundant and the AMEX card was cut in half near the front door...........6 mths later my new Company Amex Card dropped through the door.........this time I cut it up.
The following week the RFL for my ex Co Car came through the letterbox.
No I did not try and cash it but sent it to Personnel (Now called HR!!) with a suitable comment.
Son had a Visa MBNA card and was persuaded to change it to an MBNA Amex (More Rewards!!)............binned after 2 weeks - Sainsbury & John Lewis took it but nobody else it appears.
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Fringe benefits that used to be available with Amex.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF-U9nL9Ios
(Not the Nine O'Clock News)
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I'm surprised at the negativity. I have a LLoydsTSB Duo account and collect what used to be AirMiles (now Avios). That gives me an AmEx and a Mastercard.
No charges and I pay off in full by direct debit each month, so never pay interest.
The AmEx gets more Avios points and I use it for petrol and supermarket shopping - that's the vast majority of my monthly over-the-counter spending. It's perfectly true a lot of other retailers don't like it, which doesn't worry me at all. I reckon I'm ahead anyway.
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We used to have corporate Amex available for business expenses. That was swapped to Diners in the late 90s (so fewer places accept it than Amex!). I still have a Diners Club card because we're meant to but rarely use it. It's just been sold to someone as a UK card business - got the letter the other week.
It was handy as a charge card at one point when staying away a lot because you got about 2 months before the bill was due. Plenty of time to sort out getting expenses paid. Although at times I had thousands in my account ready to pay the bill! And you need to settle the bill in full when due as it's a charge card.
Amex now also do credit cards. But 'unlimited' charge card not affecting your own credit was useful.
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... But 'unlimited' charge card not affecting your own credit was useful...
There's mention of an 'assumed credit limit' in the Amex application.
Also stuff about minimum payments, so the card they are offering me is the same as any other credit card.
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Corporate AMEX used to be bad news. If the company goes bust, the T&C used to state you were personally liable.
The Group I worked for (decades ago) DID go into receivership. Amex came after cardholders...for the full amounts outstanding... Much grief etc...
Don't know the outcomes, nor if the T&Cs have changed. Worth checking though.
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I'm still supposed to use a corporate one, although memories of previous corporate cards mean that I don't bother and use my personal card instead. I'm coming up to five years with this employer and have never had an expenses repayment denied, or even questioned, for doing it this way.
If you think Amex is hard to use, you should try Diners. (Not even sure if that still exists.). Multinational IT Company did a deal with Diners in my later years there, meaning that we had to use it in place of the Amex card we'd had before. My main memory of that time is the implied 'what?' on the faces of waiters when offered this thing. Maybe it was different in the US but in Europe hardly anyone wanted to know.
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>> I'm still supposed to use a corporate one, although memories of previous corporate cards mean
>> that I don't bother and use my personal card instead. I'm coming up to five
>> years with this employer and have never had an expenses repayment denied, or even questioned,
>> for doing it this way.
We've just had a change in expenses policy. The company used to clear our corporate cards automatically regardless of if we had submitted our expenses - this has now changed and we have to claim the money back and settle the bill ourselves.
As part of this change we are no longer obliged to use the corporate issued cards, so I've started using my own tesco card - try and accumulate a few more clubcard points :-)
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Used to have a corporate AMEX card - was OK, but did occasionally find smaller hotels etc wouldn't take it. The finance bods told me that AMEX gave very good detailed break down of spend back to the company so they could easily catagorise spend - something other card issuers were not.
Couple of years back they ditched AMEX and switched to Mastercard.
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>>If you think Amex is hard to use, you should try Diners. (Not even sure if that still exists.)
I still have a Diners for work. But in some locations the company nominated hotels (we use a booking service don't take it.
We switched from AMEX to diners in either 98 or 99 (probably 99) and I'd not got my card. I alerted them and they said to wait... and then I got it sent to the office. Someone had used the original in the meantime...
.... now I had tried to stop it but they would not. But someone found a few stores that took Diners. I find some/most hotels don't these days and Amex was little better back then. But the thief had spent very little.... no doubt due to struggling to find shops taking it and not realising it was a chargecard with a relatively high 'unlimited' limit.
To this day the card is not chip and pin. But CitiGroup sold Diners and I am due a new card. Maybe that will have a chip.
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Still have the Lloyds TSB AmEx card - al the little benefits and the Avios points are well received. Very useful in the US.
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My work forces me to use Amex as the official company credit card. It makes it a right pain when you want to book flights, as they also insist on the cheapest air fares (naturally) which usually means companies like Ryanair, who will not, ever, take Amex.
Inevitably, we end up using our own credit cards instead, and the Amex sits in the drawer, unloved.
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Whatever happened to the JCB card? That made Amex and Diners look popular.
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>> Whatever happened to the JCB card? That made Amex and Diners look popular.
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The only place I've ever been where JCB was widely accepted was Japan I think. Mind you, I worked for BA back in the '90s and our corporate cards were Diners. Only ever taken by hotels BA had negotiated rates with as far as I could tell; certainly stopped anyone using a corporate card for personal spend - nowhere took the thing!
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I have a BA AMEX card purely for the miles/avios points or whatever they're now called. I find its accepted anywhere I'd normally use it, if that makes sense. Perfect for travelling and booking flights, but petrol stations and supermarkets in this country all seem to take it. Certainly adds up to enough points to make a difference, and more often than not the spend is
sufficient to trigger a 'companion' voucher, effectively doubling the value of airmiles. Since (at the moment) collecting miles on spend for my employers business is not a taxable benefit it all works well
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Does anyone still use American Express? - legacylad
