We cancelled our Amex Platinum card which was allowing us to have 50% discounts on certain eateries.
I'm saying goodbye especially to the restaurants and deals below.
W Hotel @ Sentosa : The buffet dinner was really worth it at SGD100 for 2 pax.
Szechuan Court @ Fairmont : 50% off with min. purchase of 2 main course.
Brasserie Les Saveurs @ St Regis : 50% off for the semi buffet lunch, less than SGD100 for 2 pax.
Equinox @ Fairmont : 50% off semi lunch buffet on weekends, around SGD100 for 2 pax.
The card can be used for way more promos than those that I use. The above few are just those which I tend to use the card for.
It was my wife's card so she called the Amex customer service to request for a cancellation of the annual fee. We had expected this would happen this month.
We also expected Amex not to waive the annual fee as Amex is well known to not waive annual fees.
However, we expected today to be different. We had evidence that someone had managed to get the annual fees waived. So we had expected that we could negotiate with the customer service officer.
After a couple of minutes of discussion, we used the phases...
"We know someone who had it waived for 2 years in a row."
"I know for a fact someone got it waived, he must have hit some spending criteria which we did not, can you explain what we would need to do to get it waived?"
"There must be some sort of limits or something which the person has done so there must be some form of limit which we need to hit."
"My friend's spending pattern is similar to mine. So I find it quite strange that he can get it waived and I can't"
Oh well none of them worked.
Their response was basically, they could waive half our annual fee if we wanted to continue, and, I think your friend has engaged the account... ???!!!
Ok that means spent a lot overall on the other Amex cards.
They ran checks on my wife's other Amex cards and obviously nothing was found. We basically did not use any card except this Amex Platinum.
So we're a bit sad about this cancellation. And yet we take it in our stride, cos there's lots of deals all over the place. We'll just be looking for other deals with our Entertainer app or other credit cards. Paying the annual fee would totally defeat the purpose of having this card or any other card. There are plenty of deals all around these days. If we needed to pay an annual fee, it would mean we would need to spend to "make back" or "break even" BEFORE we even start getting savings.
Actually, this also means that the Entertainer app itself should not be bought. We wouldn't have purchased it, cos the app itself is something like SGD80 for a year.
The story behind the app was that we went to a restaurant on the app in 2016, we checked the app before going to the restaurant. After we ate, the restaurant was not found on the app. Amazingly, the app admins removed the e-voucher within the 3 hours we were at the restaurant. We paid SGD160 at the restaurant when we expected to pay SGD80. So we complained to the Entertainer admins. To "refund" us the additional SGD80 which we spent, they gave us the app for another year. So essentially, we "bought" the app for 2017.
In 2016, we got the app for free as they were running some campaigns and were giving out the app for free use during that period.
Anyway, now without the card, I expect that my food spending would be more consolidated in my UOB One card. Cos during the past year, we had spent additional amounts on the Amex card due to the 50% promo, which resulted in us having to push up spending on our UOB One cards. So now we can just focus on the UOB One card and hopefully, I won't need to be prepaying Utilities and Telco bills in future.
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