Credit Cards

Monitoring pending charges with American Express

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I’m testing out the incidental airline fee credit

As I’m sure you know, the American Express Platinum cards offers a $200 incidental airline credit as an annual benefit. For the past several years I’d selected American Airlines as my go to airline and purchased 2 – $100 gift cards. Within a few days they would be credited. I’d read where this worked on multiple airlines, one being Alaska, and for 2018 I went ahead and changed my airline of choice align with my favorite loyalty program: Alaska Airlines. The problem? As of mid-2017, AS gift cards no longer code as incidental fees, and aren’t refunded if you purchased them with your Amex Plat. The fix? It’s reported that some cheap fares are being fully reimbursed…BINGO! So to test it out, I purchased a $40 one way fare to Vegas.

I set up a “pending monitor” so I can see if the charge gets reversed once it’s processed.

Log into your Amex account, go to pending charges, and there is an option in the upper right to request notification when the post moves from pending to posted. This is great, as I’ll just wait for the notification rather than having to go through the palava of logging in and pulling up my current statement.

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If it gets reversed, I’ll buy 4 more of these bad boys, cancel them, and deposit them into my wallet to use on future flights. I’ll keep you guys up to date.

Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities.

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Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card


4.8
4.8/5
The Chase Sapphire Preferred® is a great starter card that earns Premium Ultimate Rewards that can be transferred into over a dozen partners many of which are US based including Hyatt, Southwest, United, IHG, and Marriott.

Welcome Offer

60k Points after $4k spend in 3 months

Annual Fee

$95

Points Earned

Transferrable Chase Ultimate Rewards

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  • 2x on all other travel
  • $50 Annual Credit on hotel stays purchased via Chase Travel
    • The begins immediately for new cardmembers and after your account anniversary for existing cardmembers
  • 10% Anniversary Bonus
    • Every year you keep the card, your total spend will yield a 10% points bonus. If you spend $10k in a year, you’ll get 1k bonus points
  • Chase Sapphire Preferred® continues to redeem at 1.25c in the Chase Travel Portal and the slew of other benefits remain in tact including primary rental car insurance, purchase protections, etc.
  • Points are transferrable to 13 Ultimate Rewards partners
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  • No foreign transaction fees
  • Suite of Travel and Purchase Coverage
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We keep an up to date spreadsheet that lists the best ever offers: You can find that spreadsheet here.

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Main Cast: 

Cards that earn flexible points and should be used on the bulk of your purchases.

Supporting Cast:

Cards that earn fixed points in the currency of the airline/hotel and can not be transferred at attractive rates. These cards yield benefits that make it worth keeping, but not necessarily worth putting a lot of your everyday spend on. 

The Chase Sapphire Preferred® is exceptional starter card and offers transferrable Ultimate Rewards, and pairs well with other Chase cards.

If you carry this card alongside Chase’s cashback cards like the Chase Freedom Flex℠and Chase Freedom Unlimited® or the business versions: Ink Business Cash® , Ink Business Unlimited® you can combine the points into Preferred account and transfer into hotel and airline partners

Annual fee is quite low at $95 a year + you get a 10% anniversary bonus on points + $50 hotel credit in Chase travel.

The responses below are not provided or commissioned by the bank advertiser. Responses have not been reviewed, approved, or otherwise endorsed by the bank advertiser. It is not the bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.

4 Comments

  • Benji February 16, 2018

    Agggreeed. Why do you have to game it? This is why every year we get less and less valuable benefits. Just use it as it’s intended

    • Miles February 16, 2018

      Benji – Respectfully disagree. If I’m entitled to a $200 airline fee credit that Amex dictates as incidental, and the charges register as incidental, how exactly am I gaming the system? I’m not lying to Amex about my purchases, they know how certain items register on their system, and if they want to change their system, they fully have the capability to do so. Amex has the most restrictive fee credit policy as is, and if they restricted it even more, they’d lose a lot of customers, IMO…

  • […] low fare tickets actually triggers the fee credit. I recently purchased a ~$40 ticket to Vegas, set a pending alert on my Amex, and waited to see if it was refunded. A day after it posted, wham, bam, it was refunded on my […]

  • WR February 11, 2018

    This is why we can’t have nice things.

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