A Review of Amex Platinum Charge 2024
- Ava Lyn
- Dec 27, 2024
- 15 min read
Updated: Apr 30
2024 is almost over and it's time to look at how the Amex Platinum Charge card has been for us this year. We have had this card for a few years now, despite its annual fee charges and depreciating value (in vouchers etc). This is a card that suits our lifestyle and in this post, we will share what the return in value has been for us.
Summary
Benefit | Value Assigned | Comments |
Amex Annual Credits | 1354 SGD | Airline, Global Dining, Entertainment, Fashion, Lifestyle Credits |
Amex Vouchers | 660 SGD | Hotel Stay, Wine, Massage, Dining Vouchers |
Airport Lounge Access | 600 SGD | 30 visits valued at SGD 20 each |
FHR Hotel Benefits | 2500 SGD | Hotel Credits, Breakfasts |
Accelerated Hotel Loyalty | Not Valued | Marriott Bonvoy, Hilton, Pan Pacific, Radisson |
Love Dining | 1300 SGD | 26 visits valued at SGD 50 each |
Chillax By Amex | 0 SGD | Complimetary Drinks |
Random Offers | 756 SGD | Amex App Offers |
Como C5 Benefits | 330 SGD | Club21, Como Dining, Grocery vouchers and Yoga class |
Paragon Club | No value assigned | Paragon lounge visits |
Marina Bay Sands Prestige Benefits | No value assigned | Prestige Level Membership |
Retention Offer | 180 SGD | 40,000 MR |
Insurance and Protection | No value assigned | Travel, Purchases insurance |
Concierge Service | No value assigned | General Help |
Amex Events | 260 SGD | A Christmas Story |
2024 Total Value: 7940 SGD
For a very detailed breakdown, continue reading! Because we share some of our tips and tricks to maximise and further add value to the benefits.
Amex Annual Credits
The annual recurring credits and are quite straight forward to utilise. And ones that we always use every year.
Amex Airline Credit
The airline credit sits at 200 SGD rebate for a minimum 600 SGD spend on either SQ or Scoot, in one transaction. Although the miles earning rate (1.95 miles/dollar) is poor, any flights purchased via Amex provides complimentary insurance (see Section on Insurance and Protection for more details) which helps when utilising this flight credit.
Global Dining Credit
The total value sits at 400 SGD, with 200 SGD under local dining credit and 200 SGD under global dining credit. For global dining credit, just remember to check the restaurants that are acceptable under this option and spend away.
To maximise the value of the local dining credit, we would typically stack this with either extra discounts from hotel loyalties or one of the many Amex offers that are run through the year. In this instance, we were able to stack Pan Pacific offer which was spend 400 SGD, get 80 SGD back and then utilise GHA titanium status to get an additional 25 % off and still get this 200 SGD credit back. Maximising this requires a bit of patience but I guarantee you that this is absolutely worthwhile.
Entertainment Credit
The entertainment credit is 17 SGD monthly, which makes the annual value, 204 SGD. This means a free Netflix subscription. Thank you, Amex. Apart from Netflix and Disney+, newspaper subscriptions through SPH media and payments made online for Ticketmaster also qualify. So remember to check
Fashion Credit
150 SGD spilt into 75 SGD per half year that can be utilised on NET-A-PORTER or MR PORTER. This one is an easy one. Stack it with existing promotions and get the rebate back. It can seem abit like forced spending, but we always seem to have things to buy on these 2 sites.
Lifestyle Credit
Spend a minimum of 600 SGD and receive 400 SGD back. There are a number of spas on the list. However, our default is always Grand Cru for some wines. Note that the price of these wines are not always the best value as the site puts a premium on the price tag. So the value is definitely less than 400 SGD. But for the purposes of this review, we are going to keep it at 400 SGD and assume we rocked up to a bottle shop, didn't do price research and just bought a bottle or 2.
The Grand Total of rebates and savings from the Amex Annual Credits alone is 1354 SGD.
Benefit | Comments | Value Assigned |
Amex Airline Credit | Qualifying spend with SQ or Scoot | 200 SGD |
Amex Global Dining Credit | 200 SGD Local and 200 SGD Overseas | 400 SGD |
Amex Entertainment Credit | Monthly valued at SGD 17 per month | 204 SGD |
Amex Fashion Credit | Net-a-porter, SGD 75 half yearly | 150 SGD |
Amex Lifestyle Credit | Grand Cru Platinum | 400 SGD |
Total | 1354 SGD |
Amex Vouchers
I shared in another post about the 2025 vouchers. The 2024 vouchers were similar in nature, where we had some that we utilised, some that were ambiguous and perhaps utilised and definitely some that we just put into the discard pile.
Complimentary Hotel Stay
This year, we stayed at Mandarin Oriental KL and were given a Deluxe Park View room that overlooks the KLCC park. Being right next to KLCC makes it a wonderful tourist option. In general, MO KL is old school, as is evident in their yellow marble toilet and choice of carpet. The hotel is maintained very well and our stay was good. MO is one of our favourite hotel chains and I wouldn't say that the MO KL stay represents an MO stay very well. However, considering it is a free night stay, with free breakfast, we cannot complain and will still stay again if it is free. An average weekend one night stay is around 270 SGD.
Complimentary Wines
There are 2 vouchers that can be claimed from Fairmont. If you have the Amex Platinum Reserve card, there are definitely more wine vouchers (this is for another post for another time) and that is why we pretty much have every wine type available. These are not fantastic wines and we save them for cooking. A stew or risotto where we can add a general splash of wine. I would value them at around 10 SGD per bottle.
Spa Vouchers
Sometimes we remember to use these spa vouchers. Like this year and got 2 massage with 100 SGD off each with a minimum spend of 180 SGD.
Dining Vouchers
Looking at our vouchers this year, we only utilized 2 vouchers:
Wan Hao for 30 % off. This 30 % includes everything on the bill, including drinks. Do remember that Wan Hao is part of Love Dining, so do your math to see if it makes sense to use this 30 %! For us, it did, and we saved approximately 120 SGD utilising this voucher.
Mikuni 50 SGD off. Mikuni has now closed but we managed to squeeze in a last minute run, just to utilize the voucher. We had an Udon and Tempura set and were unimpressed. Not a restaurant that I would go to without big discounts luring me which is just as well that it has since closed.
Other vouchers include Wooloomooloo, Jaan, Tower Club 100 SGD vouchers. I dont think we will make it to Tower Club this year. The barrier to entry seems to high, with restrictions on how many Amex members per day, dim sum slots needs to be booked months in advance, 10 % slap on food prices. And honestly, the food is just not great. So we are likely going to just sacrifice this voucher, or perhaps one day we will drop by to grab a bottle of wine (if they are available, that is).
Benefit | Comments | Value Assigned |
Complimentary Hotel Stay | MO KL | 270 SGD |
Complimentary Wine | 2x bottles | 20 SGD |
Spa Vouchers | 2x spa | 200 SGD |
Dining Vouchers | Wan Hao, Mikuni | 170 SGD |
Total | 660 SGD |
The grand total of savings from using the 2024 Amex Vouchers stand at 660 SGD. A pretty decent job this year! If you would like to read more about the Amex 2025 Voucher Pack:
Airport Lounge Access
This is one of a favourite perk of ours. Unlimited lounge visits with 1 guest for both the primary as well as supp card holders. Which means if you travel with 2 cards, a total of 4 guests can enter the lounge.
Everyone assigns a different value on lounge accesses. For us, it is where we will typically have our meal before the flight and also get abit of rest, hydration and perhaps a shower before a flight. For this reason, we value each lounge access at 20 SGD.
This year, we utilised 30 lounge visits, which equals 600 SGD in value for us. If you travel plenty, perhaps with friends and family and do not frequent the Business Class lounges or airline loyalty lounges too frequently. I am sure you would enjoy this perk as much as we do.
2024 Value: 600 SGD
FHR Hotel Benefits
FHR or Fine Hotels and Resorts is something we find the most value in. We travel enough to maximise the benefits of using FHR. Bear in mind that booking through AMEX Travel often means a premium is slapped on, so do check against other premium hotel booking apps (like Hotelux, Little Emperors) to check that you have the most meaningful upgrades that are of value to you.
For Amex FHR, book through the Amex Travel Website to receive:
Guaranteed upgrade
Early check in (12 pm)
Late check out (4 pm)
Daily breakfast for 2
100 USD property credit
For 2024, we stayed at 11 properties and had a total of 40 breakfasts. Out of our stays, we need to highlight some of our best stays which hopefully can be an inspiration for your next travel. We particularly enjoyed:
Intercontinental Danang Sun Peninsula
Mandarin Oriental Doha
Mondrian Bordeaux
Four Seasons Melbourne
We get really fantastic upgrades as part of FHR. However, we decided to leave out the actual value of these upgrades because different people value these upgrades differently. If you are interested in the upgrades that we have received as part of FHR, visit our individual posts on the different hotels we have stayed in to check them out. We will list whether it was booked under FHR, what was the base room that we booked and what we were upgraded to and the value per the rates from the hotel's website.
Another part of the upgrade that we decided not to include as value is the early check in and late check out benefit. 12 pm check ins and 4 pm check outs are something we utilise very extensively. In fact, the earliest check in we had done was 6 am at MO Doha and they even sent us to the buffet breakfast counter to get some early morning feed.
Benefit | Comments | Value Assigned |
Amex FHR Hotel Credits | 11 credits each with approximately 150 SGD value | 1500 SGD |
Amex FHR Breakfast Benefits | 40 breakfasts valued at SGD 25 each | 1000 SGD |
Room Upgrades | At least one category | Not Valued |
Early Check In, Late Check Out | 12 pm check in, 4 pm check out | Not Valued |
2024 Value: 2500 SGD
Hotel Accelerated Loyalty
As part of the Amex Platinum charge, you get hotel accelerated loyalty:
Marriott Bonvoy™ Gold Elite Status
Pan Pacific DISCOVERY Platinum Status
Hilton Honors Elite Gold Status
Radisson Rewards Premium Status
For us, Hilton Honors Gold is the best out of the 4. There is free breakfast offered as part of being Gold Status which the rest dont. For us, we have Marriott Bonvoy Platinum and GHA Titanium which are higher statuses than what Amex Platinum Charge is providing. So for this hotel accelerated loyalty category, we will keep the value at 0 SGD.
2024 Value: 0 SGD
Love Dining
For a period of time, Amex Love Dining was terrible. But through 2024, we saw several progressive and nice additions to the program and a revival of our interest to dine at some of these additions. For those who are not too familiar, the benefits vary depending on the number of diners you have. Since, it is just my partner and I dining most nights, we get to maximise the benefits at 50 % off. Always check in on the latest lists of Amex Love Dining Restaurants and Hotels as they do change and update through the year:
For this section, I am not going to do a full listing of the savings at each restaurant each time, so what I will do is list the restaurants that we visited and take an average of 50 SGD savings. This is much less than some of the savings we had incurred, but provides a good reflection of the amount of eating out we did this year (:
Jia He Grand Chinese Restaurant x2 visits
Quenino by Victor Liong
Sen of Japan
Si Chuan Dou Hua x4 visits
Yan
Matera (Replaced with Club Matera)
L'Angelus
Burgers and Lobsters (No longer available)
Tapas 24
Prego
Skai Restaurant
Stamford Brasserie x3 visits
Madison's
MOGA
Wan Hao
Tien Court
Hua Ting
Entrepot x2
Mikuni
That makes it a grand total of 26 visits to Love Dining Restaurants. Some of them are stacked with Random Amex Offers which I will expand on a little more below. At 50 SGD savings per visit, the 2024 savings stands at 1300 SGD. Personally i think we did a spectacular job utilizing Love Dining this year.
2024 Value: 1300 SGD
Chillax By Amex
There is also Chillax by Platinum where you get a complimentary drink at some bars. However, we are quite selective and typically have a tipple during our meals or at home, so this year, like the past, we have not utilized any benefits from Chillax. If drinking out is up your alley, check out Amex's page for the latest promotions:
2024 Value: 0 SGD
Random Offers
We actually love the thrill of checking in on the app for some of these random offers that get allocated which you can sign up to. Some of them are extremely good value and stacking them makes it even better. We lost track of how many offers we received and Amex tells us it is at 756 SGD this year and that sounds probably quite close to our actuals. But we wanted to share our stacking hack to get the most value out of these offers. We don't utilise all of the offers, but when it makes sense to, we would try to utilise them.
For example:
Parkroyal restaurant and/or stay credit stacked with 25 % Titanium Hotel Loyalty (obtained from Citi Prestige) benefit at Si Chuan Dou Hua. On top of this, meant that our meal was essentially super charged with benefits.
Air ticket promotions. We were planning a trip to BKK early next year with the family and Thai Airways ran a promotion for 100 SGD back for every 800 SGD spend. It was an easy decision for us. Save that 100 SGD, spend it on food in BKK. Through the year, there were other promotions, including Qantas. However, some promotions may not be the most ideal combination for your lifestyle or for stacking your loyalty programs. For example, we have both Star Alliance Gold as well as One World Ruby, so we are not fussed with which airline we fly, unless we have fly enough to maintain our status. However, if you are a Singapore Airlines diehard member, then promotions like Qantas will not appeal as much.
Sephora Year End Promotion: Spend $120 or more and get $12 SGD back, up to 2 times. I absolutely loved this promotion this year. This coincided with 20 % off at Sephora as well as Raffles City Christmas Wonders Promotion. Which meant that I could stack multiple promotions at the same time.
Phoon Huat and RedMan: We bake quite abit at home and at the end of the year when we increase the number of hosting events, it means more runs to Phoon Huat too. This year, we timed it well and managed to stack this offer together with the mall offer at Star Vista which was spend 100 SGD and get free parking, 10 SGD voucher and another 10 SGD voucher (from a spin and win). So the total rebate ended up being closer to 28.60 SGD for a 100 SGD spend.
Ding Tai Fung. Randomly through the year, there are partnerships for different restaurants, cafes, lifestyle shops (e.g. Japan Home, Muji). This is also one we love the idea of stacking with. We have DTF every so often, and if we do so at Paragon (with the Paragon Prestige Membership) or with Capitastar or Sands Prestige membership, then we get both the credits as well as mall points.
Amex Shop Small is a get 3 SGD back for every 10 SGD spend up to 5 times and runs once a year. The shop small map has grown extensively and I am sure there is a shop small somewhere in your vicinity.
These offers are cheap thrills for us. Some offers we would never utilise, but some offers are a nice discount to have a meal or get some home stuff.
2024 Value: 756 SGD
Complimentary COMO C5 Membership
The complimentary COMO C5 membership is only valid for 12 months. Afterwhich, your membership will drop to COMO C4, with a reduced value in vouchers. Alternatively, if you meet the minimum spend for the upcoming year, you retain your status.
A Como C5 membership will get you:
200 SGD Shopping Vouchers at Club21 Singapore, Kids21 Singapore and Dover Street Market Singapore
40 SGD Dining Vouchers at COMO Group restaurants in Singapore
20 SGDGourmet Grocery Vouchers at SuperNature Singapore and Glow Singapore
In addition, we also went for a complimentary yoga session at COMO Shambhala. It was a very pleasant experience and we went for a Hatha 1 session and had a nice deep stretch. It's a great way to try a new wellness studio. Unfortunately for us, there were some misses, including in sufficient towels in the mens changing room and insufficient showers in the womens changing room that made us appreciate our regular gym alot more. But I can see the appeal of COMO Shambhala and their ethos towards wellness. We value this session at 70 SGD (35 SGD x 2 pax), a typical drop in, single pass price.
2024 Value: 330 SGD
Complimentary Paragon Club Membership
This is for the first year only and after that you have to meet the minimum spend to retain Prestige membership. As part of this level, you get complimentary access to the Paragon Lounge - rest, get a coffee, water or even take a business call in one of the meeting rooms available. They also run multiple promotions during the year, including free parking during festive periods (currently up to 31 Dec 24) after 5pm and a free $10 F&B voucher with a $50 spend Mon-Thurs (of course subject to availability). We are not going to value this benefit though we did randomly pop into the paragon club this year to get some coffee and water.
There are more little deals and rewards that are available so remember to check the Paragon Club website for details:
2024 Value: 0 SGD
Complimentary Marina Bay Sands Lifestyle Prestige Membership
This is another one which is for the first year only and you have to meet the minimum spend to retain Prestige membership. I am not sure we utilised this so much except gathering of points when we dine at MBS (Sen of Japan for Love Dining Benefits). There are some 10x Accelerator shops there (e.g. Frette, Panerai, IWC etc) so if you wanted to get something nice, its great to get 10x plus MBS points for some points supercharge. For us, we lost the MBS Lifestyle Prestige Membership as the benefits and membership did not suit our lifestyle.
2024 Value: 0 SGD
Retention Offer
40,000 MR was offered to us this year upon renewal of the annual fee. This equates to approximately 22,000 Krisflyer miles or $180 SGD worth of Amazon giftcards on the Amex redemption page. This equates approximately 0.45 cents per MR.
2024 Value: 180 SGD
Insurance and Protection
This is a category that is quite hard to put a value to but it is one that gives us a peace of mind on purchases and travel. For example, we purchase our phones and computers through Amex for the extended warranty protection. In the event that there is a unforeseen repairs required, then this would automatically cover the repairs. This can be stacked with your Accelerator merchants, which is added protection and ease of mind on expensive purchases.
Coverage includes:
Travel Insurance
Purchase Protection
Return Guarantee
Extended Warranty
Conditions apply, so always refer to the Amex website for the latest updates:
2024 Value: 0 SGD
Concierge Service
The value of the concierge service is hard to quantify. But definitely something we value. For example, when I forgot my Hertz membership and called them up, they were able to pull all these linked membership numbers up and always politely and respectfully. We are not going to value this, but I certainly appreciate the level of professionalism that the Amex Concierge provides whenever we have a query.
2024 Value: 0 SGD
Amex Events
Amex collaborates with quite a number of brands and there are always events, including previews to new season clothes, watches, fragrances etc. Unfortunately, we had a pretty busy year this year. So we did not attend too many events. The few we went to, including the Sabon 2nd generation body scrub launch event was a nice way to experience new products, get some pretty good deals as well as freebies, including getting fed as well as some tea to bring home. We value these events at 0 SGD as these are really meant to be experiential in nature.
A Christmas Story is an annual event that is hosted by Amex and Amex users affectionately call this event Kiap Kiap. For every 180 SGD spend, you get 2 chances at the claw machine, where you can win a variety of prizes, with a maximum of 4 chances a day. At this pop up, there is also free nuts, coffee, still, sparkling water as well as gift wrapping services. This year there was also a cotton candy machine which both the kids and the adults enjoyed everytime we were there. This year, we won 17000 MR (approximately 75 SGD), a Venchi Chocolate Bookset (valued at 85 SGD) as well as a Samsonite childrens luggage (valued at approximately 100 SGD). The total value sits at approximately 260 SGD. Not bad, considering we needed to do our Christmas shopping anyway.
2024 Value: 260 SGD
Overall Thoughts
Our dollar value from savings and benefits from using our Amex Platinum Charge card was 7940 SGD. Compared to its annual rate of 1744 SGD. I would say we did a stellar job at utilising this card for what it is worth. It is not a card for everyone, however if you have a lifestyle that supports the benefits that it provides, then I certainly think this card is a keeper.
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