Can I cancel Amex Preferred Rewards Gold Credit Card and still get anniversary bonus points?

spaceaarvark

Amex Preferred Rewards Gold Credit Card awards 10,000 bonus points if you spend £15,000 in the first year (which I have). The catch is that they award the bonus points 60 days after your "anniversary" date.

I am not intending to still have the card 60 days after the annivesary date as I am not going to pay the annual £160 (was £140, now £160) fee.

Apparently (i.e.I have read) the points already accrued in your account disappear when you cancel. Not a problem since I can transfer all of my poiints out before I cancel.
But I guess that means I will not get the 10,000 bonus points.

ALSO apparently (i.e. I have read) you can keep your points from being lost by simply opening a (fee free) Amex Rewards Credit Card (inot Gold, not Preferred, but still Rewards). When I read this I was hoping it would mean that I would get the 10,000 bonus points paid into my account, but now I am thinking that: No, when the Gold card is closed that's an end of it.

Has anyone had experience of this? Or does anyone know of any other way to get the bonus points 2 months after cancelling the card?

Marchitiello

No, you will not get the anniversary points, hence the 60 days delay. What you read about signing up for a fee free Rewards card and retain the MR is correct.

However, Amex is one of the few card issuer that would refund pro-rata full year fee if the cancellation happens mid year and that is quite common between Amex customers. It is up to you however to ascertain if 10,000 MR points are worth the £27 or £40 circa of keeping the card for a further 2/3 months (please note that you would need to pay the full £160 annual fee (I guess your anniversary date is after 12th October) to then get a pro-rata refund for the unused months at cancellation) 

spaceaarvark

Thanks, that's what I thought. The 10,000 points translates to £80 worth of Nectar points (using the MSE Avios trick) so I'm thinking it will be worth my while to keep the card open for 3 months so that I at least get £40 worth of benefit.

Voyager2002

I can confirm that the advice given on this thread is correct and has worked for me. I would add that since their customer service is pretty good, you could ask them what to do. Once you have opened a free Amex card and reached the anniversary date, you have earned the bonus and have an account into which the bonus reward points can be placed. At that point logically you should be allowed to cancel the paid-for card and still receive the bonus, but this is something you would need to confirm with them.