New AMEX Offer: Earn up to 3.3 mpd on hawker centres, supermarkets, fast food and more

American Express has launched a new AMEX Offer for Everyday Spending, which allows cardholders to earn bonus rewards for transactions at selected cafes, supermarkets, hawker centres and fast-food restaurants.

Like all AMEX Offers, this may be targeted. If you don’t see it in the AMEX app or online, you can try to call up customer service to do a manual registration, but there’s no guarantee you’ll be successful.

Bonus rewards for Everyday Spending

This AMEX Offer runs from 23 April to 18 June 2021, and is available on AMEX Singapore Airlines Credit Cards, the AMEX Singapore Airlines Business Credit Card and the AMEX CapitaCard. 

Registration is required, and can be done via the AMEX app or the online banking portal. Once registered, cardholders will earn rewards on Everyday Spend (see next section for definition) as follows:

Rewards per S$1
	Base	Bonus	Total
AMEX KrisFlyer Credit Card	1.1 miles	2 miles	3.1 miles
AMEX KrisFlyer Ascend	1.2 miles	2 miles	3.2 miles
AMEX PPS Credit Card	1.3 miles	2 miles	3.3 miles
AMEX Solitaire PPS Credit Card	1.3 miles	2 miles	3.3 miles
AMEX SIA Business Card	1.8 HighFlyer points	4 HighFlyer points	5.8 HighFlyer points
AMEX CapitaCard	5 STAR$	15 STAR$	20 STAR$

The bonus component is capped at S$200 of spending throughout the entire campaign period. In other words, the maximum bonus you can earn is:

• 400 KrisFlyer miles
• 800 HighFlyer points
• 3,000 STAR$

Registrations are subject to the following quotas:

• All AMEX Singapore Airlines Credit Cards: 15,000
• AMEX Singapore Airlines Business Card: 1,000
• AMEX CapitaCard: 8,000

How is Everyday Spending defined?

Everyday Spending refers to all in person transactions made at the following merchants (online transactions do not qualify):

An exact list of locations can be found at this link. For hawker centres, look out for the AMEX logo and pay with AMEX Pay. 

The bonus rewards points or miles will be credited within 5 business days from qualifying spend, but may take up to 90 days from the end of the offer date. In practice, they post very fast though.

What are the alternatives?

While it’s always good to see more offers, most miles chasers will find that they could do better with alternative cards.

For example, the HSBC Revolution (review here) would earn 4 mpd on cafes, supermarkets and fast food, capped at S$1,000 per month- keep in mind you’ll need to use contactless payments.

Alternatively, if mobile payments are accepted (and the merchant does not participate in the SMART$ program), you could earn 4 mpd with the UOB Preferred Platinum Visa (review here), capped at S$1,110 per month. 

So the best use case I can think of this promotion is hawker centre spending, where you normally couldn’t use a credit card anyway.

Conclusion

A decent offer from AMEX, although the relatively low bonus cap and presence of better alternatives mean its usefulness may be limited.

For the sake of comparison, 2019’s Everyday Spending campaign offered the same 2 mpd bonus, capped at S$200 per calendar month, and I don’t think we had a similar offer during 2020.