Amex Airline Fee Credits Without Travel (Amex Gold, Platinum and Hilton Aspire)

hi i'm bethany walsh frombougiemiles.

com if you're just getting started with bougiei'm all about helping you travel as luxuriously as possible while spendingas little cash as possible before we get started it would beamazing if you guys could give me a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel itreally helps the american express airline incidentalcredit is available on three different types ofcards platinum cards gold cards and thehilton aspire on the amex platinum cards both business andpersonal there is a fee credit available of 200on the personal gold card it's 100 and on the american express hilton aspireit's 250.

for those of us who travel often the airline incidental credit is agreat benefit it definitely helps to reduce the annualfee unfortunately amex does not make it thateasy for us to use first it has to be an incidental feeit can't just be like airfare tickets or upgrade costs even though upgrades dosometimes work anybody who travels regularly enoughalready gets free bags and probably already has like lounge access so theydon't really need snacks on board the platinum cart itself offers loungeaccess to thousands of lounges around the worldhere's the list of examples that amex gives forwhat qualifies for the credit the flexibility and thereby the value ofthis benefit has definitely decreased over the years when i got myfirst platinum card it was pretty much any gift card onany airline would trigger the credit now gift cards are mostly done away withokay so first things first we want to make sure that what you're doing totrigger the credit is not going to get refunded becausethat seems to be what precipitated amex clawing back all these credits fromlast year second we're going to put a little bitmore thought into it than we have in the pastwhat i mean by that is i want you to think aboutlike think proactively about how you're going to maximize thisand what the best airline for you to do that isnot necessarily which airline you fly the most and if you really think aboutit that makes perfect sense because the airline that you fly the most is the oneyou're most likely to have benefits with rightso you probably already have free checked bags i know when i was executiveplatinum for all those years i had free snacks like there was no reason i wouldever need to charge any kind of incidental fee to the cardbut necessity is the mother of invention andi figured out a few ways to still use american airlinesbut get maximum value from my cards my other favorite airlines do it with isjetblue and i'll explain why in a minute okay so let's start with americanairlines first of all i like to use my credits on two thingswith aaa number one mileage multiplier basicallywhen you're checking out it doesn't have to be a cash fareit can be a an award ticket as well you have the option to do what's calledmileage multiplier for a certain amount of money they will sell youx amount of miles it usually turns out to be about three cents per mileslightly less or slightly more it's a pretty fixed rateand basically what you do is if you're paying pointsyou just add it and then pay with your mx card and if you're paying cash i justcheck out as usual buy the tickets and then a couple days later i log inand it usually gives you the option like if you try to change seats or doanything that has to do with modifying your ticket itwill give you the mileage multiplier optionthis has been a really good way for me to geta ton of miles and basically they've all been freewhen i say a ton of miles it actually is becausei have the aspire the business platinum the personal platinumand the gold card so yes i have had to maximizea ton of airline incidental fee credits over the years a second really nice wayto do it with aa is if you or anyone you know has statusis to buy 500 mile upgrades they're available for40 per upgrade and they have without failcredited again though you can only use them onflights where you're flying with an elite member or if you have elite statusso that might not be that useful for everyone but i knoweverybody can use american airlines milesi don't fly jetblue as much because they don't have mints on every flightbut i will say that i think that they are the easiest airlineto utilize the credit for jetblue does notallow you to purchase even more seats as part of a fareso basically what you're doing is you're adding onpremium economy because that's the only way that jetblue will allow you toadd the premium economy seat to any uh i think it's called a blue fair rightthat's economy and then they actually don't even letyou use points for that so you have to pay cashfor the upgrade to premium economy which they call uheven more seating depending on how far the route is or how long your flight iseven more ranges from i think i've seen it as low as 39up to 129 i have consistently without failseen this be reimbursed every single yearanother creative way to maximize your fee credit isis to book a fare with a delta gift card and pay the difference with youramex card if you keep it under 100 you should get reimbursed and it's notgoing to be refunded so amex really shouldn't have an issue letting you keepthat the last way that i found to trigger thefee credit that works for me is to book an economy or premium economyflight with my preferred airline which isalways either american delta or jetblueand then wait a few days log back in and check the upgrade offeri found that if the upgrade offer is less than 200which it often is on domestic flights that gets reimbursedif you guys have found other amazing ways to do this please let me know iknow sometimes cheap airfare works like if it's under100 it looks like a fee but i also know that can be risky iwould love to hear what everyone else has doneand whether this change going forward is going to affect whether or not you keepthe cards i wish i could tell you that there wassome great work around but honestly i think we already found them and i thinkthat's why people's fees are getting invalidated right this has notbeen a great year for travel credits we saw thecrystal national bank infinite visa did i say that right get reducedby up to 75 the chase sapphire reserve still has an easy credit to use but theyup the fee and then cities is super easy but whowants to deal with city not me so my adviceto everybody who really doesn't think they can use it oris not getting value out of it especially for somebody wholike would never upgrade to an even more seat on jetblueif you're never going to do that you can't really count that as valueor if you're never going to upgrade the delta or the aaa ones really don't workfor you so my advice to those people would betry to find an alternative i do however think that with thistightening they're going to lose customersand i feel like everything is cyclical right so if they're losing a ton ofcustomers right now because business is good and they're able to tighten thingsthey're gonna have to loosen those standards a little bit in two yearswhen their earnings go down or when competition stiffens you never know soit could be either or but i think you'll be okay if you haveto cancel and then maybe you'll get an upgrade offer a retention offer whoknows we've been seeing people get like 50kupgrade offers or was it 40k upgrade offers on the um amex gold cardi called for my platinum card both of them i have a business platinum anda personal platinum i called for both of themin i think it was january and february one of them i gotnothing and the second one i got 10k so good luck to the people who areactually getting those i know i'm not either way let me know what you'replanning on doing and if you have found any creative ways i'malso going to post a link to the flyer talk threads for anybody whodoesn't already follow them basically it gives you a ton of datapoints on what works and what doesn't for each airline.