Check Your Amex Offers – Bonus Points Available On Some SPG Cards (Again)

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A little over a week ago American Express published a targeted offer which allowed select holders of SPG co-branded credit cards to earn bonus points when they hit specific spending thresholds on their cards.

I hold the regular (non-premium) version of the Amex SPG co-branded credit card and my account wasn’t targeted for the bonus…..but now it has suddenly appeared.

Last week I definitely didn’t have a bonus points offer on my American Express SPG credit card but, as of today, this is what I see in my account:

I can’t seem to find a definition of “eligible spend” so I’m left to assume that it just means “normal spending on the credit card that would earn points in the usual way”.

Clicking on the “register now” button takes you to a registration page (unsurprisingly!) showing the full details of the offer:

• Register by 31 October 2018
• Earn 10,000 bonus points after spending $4,000 by 30 November 2018
• Earn 5,000 bonus points after spending a further $2,000 by 30 November 2018

So that’s a total of $6,000 spend that’s required to earn 15,000 bonus points.

Thoughts

If you have a lot of Marriott/SPG stays coming up then this could be a very nice offer for you.

Both the Starwood Preferred Guest credit card from American Express and the Starwood Preferred Guest Luxury Card earn 6 points/dollar when used at any Marriott or SPG properties so, if you can hit the spending targets solely with stays at Marriott/SPG properties, you could net 51,000 points with this offer.

51,000 points is more than enough for a free night at a Category 6 property like the JW Marriott Los Angeles LA LIVE…..

….two nights at a Category 4 property like the JW Marriott Bangkok….

…or even 6 nights at any Category 1 property.

That’s not a bad return on your spending if you were already planing to spend $6,000 with Marriott/SPG.

Things don’t look so great if your spending would have to be outside the Marriott/SPG network.

The SPG co-branded credit cards earn 2 points/dollar on all non-Marriott/SPG spend and, as I value Marriott points at 0.7 cents each, that’s a total return of 1.4 cents/dollar.

That’s not great.

There are a lot of credit cards that will earn points worth more than 1.4 cents each and there are numerous cashback cards at will earn at least 2.0 cents/dollar so using a SPG co-branded Amex card instead of these cards comes at a cost.

Personally I think the cost here is too high and I’d rather forgo the Marriott points in favor of earning one of the convertible currencies instead….but you may feel differently.

Bottom Line

Based on my experience it looks like Marriott is targeting more SPG co-branded card holders with the offer it first released a little over a week ago. If you weren’t targeted first time around you should check you account(s) again to see if things have changed.

Whether this offer is good or not will depend entirely on how you plan to reach the $4,000 or $6,000 target – for some this will make sense while other would probably be better off moving on.