My life after the AMEX Platinum Charge

Back in October 2025, I said goodbye to my AMEX Platinum Charge, calling time on a seven-year relationship.

In one sense, this had been a long time coming. While I really loved the early days with NOOK and Platinum af’FAIR, watch shows and wine appreciation, double points and statement credit value, the card just wasn’t pulling its weight anymore.

Like Marvel movies, it had started to feel less enjoyable and more like homework, and there came a point where I decided that enough was enough. To put it another way, it wasn’t just expensive— it was exhausting. 

Six months later, I wanted to share some thoughts on life after the AMEX Platinum Charge…

What did I replace the AMEX Platinum Charge with?

The hole in my heart wallet left by the AMEX Platinum Charge has been replaced with two main cards.

AMEX Platinum Credit Card

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Since I still needed a “container” for my remaining Membership Rewards (MR) points, I downgraded to the S$327 AMEX Platinum Credit Card. For that fee, I get to continue enjoying Love Dining and Chillax benefits, plus a S$200 annual Fashion & Dining credit (well, when the registration link finally arrives!).

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I was eligible for a welcome offer of 15,000 MR points despite not being new-to-AMEX, which also helps offset the first year’s annual fee.

HSBC Premier Mastercard

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With the loss of the AMEX Platinum Charge, I needed a replacement “benefits card”. So I got the HSBC Premier Mastercard for its airport lounge and limo benefits, picking up a whopping 106,200 miles welcome offer in the process (no longer available, sadly).

While a benefits card, as the name suggests, is usually for perks rather than spending, the HSBC Premier Mastercard actually has a very decent 1.68/2.76 mpd earn rate for local/FCY spending. Given that HSBC points are incredibly flexible, I’ve been using it for overseas spend once the bonus caps on higher-earning cards are exhausted.

Through this card, I also enjoy World Elite Mastercard benefits such as hotel elite status, an annual 3GB Flexiroam data package, and Avis President’s Club status.

My thoughts on life after the AMEX Platinum Charge

No more Platinum Anxiety

If I had to sum up in one phrase why I decided to jump ship, it’s “Platinum Anxiety” — the persistent, nagging feeling that one might not be getting a good enough return on a $1,744 annual fee.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the AMEX Platinum Charge can be a fantastic card, provided you put in the work.

Many of its benefits require active involvement, whether it’s monitoring and jumping on limited-capacity events, doing the annual voucher clearing exercise, planning your trips around places you can utilise both the Global Dining and Platinum Stay benefits, or sparring with the Christmas claw machine.

Some people get a kick out of it, I’m sure. There’s a certain visceral thrill to knowing that you’re beating the system, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some cardholders earn back their annual fee on the claw machine alone!

I used to feel the same way too, but as the years went by, I gradually lost the energy to keep up. I began letting vouchers go to waste, because I simply didn’t have the time to redeem them. My attendance at events dwindled, I skipped the Christmas pop-up altogether, and ultimately I just didn’t have the bandwidth to manage the cognitive load this card required.

But while my engagement declined, the S$1,744 annual fee remained the same, and it started to feel like I had an albatross around my neck that I had to keep justifying. Now my most expensive card is the S$327 AMEX Platinum Credit Card, and I sleep a lot better at night.

Now they simplify the Platinum Statement Credits!

When the AMEX Platinum Charge relaunched in 2018, it offered a S$400 airline and S$400 hotel credit, both of which were simple enough to use.

But in 2023, American Express replaced it with a convoluted system of six different statement credits, and effectively doubled the workload in 2025 by dividing the credits into half-yearly allotments. This was a big reason why I decided to drop my AMEX Platinum Charge— it was just too much to juggle. 

So I had to laugh at the irony that just a few months after my cancellation, American Express simplified the system by dropping three categories and consolidating the dining credit into a single annual credit!

While it’s nowhere as straightforward as 2018, I will say that the current Platinum Statement Credits are a lot easier to use compared to before:

• You can spend the entire Global Dining credit in a single trip
• The Airline credit is relatively straightforward to use, assuming you book one ticket every six months
• The Platinum Wine credit is obviously of limited use to teetotalers, and the portal you need to shop on is notorious for mark-ups, but a MileLion community member has built a helpful tool to compare prices and filter out the booby traps

If you need a guide on how to use them, refer to the article below.

Guide: AMEX Platinum Charge annual S$800 statement credits

Table for Two gives me FOMO

At the start of 2026, the AMEX Platinum Charge launched a new benefit called Table for Two, which offers a free meal for two persons at participating restaurants in Singapore, six times a year.

I won’t lie. I do feel a bit of FOMO seeing the photos that people are sending in the Telegram Group. It feels like a nice date night opportunity, and if you pick the restaurants right, six free meals for two people a year could go some way towards covering the annual fee. 

What’s more, a lot of the fears regarding the booking process didn’t play out. It is first-come, first-serve in the sense that there are limited tables each night, but with a two-month dining window and numerous restaurants participating, every cardmember should be able to enjoy the full six meals.

I miss the “Platinum spaces”

Another thing I miss about the AMEX Platinum Charge are the little private spaces it offers access to, useful for catching a quick break or getting some work done.

NOOK is long gone, but there are two main lounge spaces that cardholders can use: the AMEX Platinum Store at Raffles City, and the Paragon Club, accessible through the six-months Paragon Club Prestige Tier upgrade.

There’s also the new Platinum Private Spaces benefit, which is currently offering access to the swimming pool and gym at Pan Pacific Orchard (albeit by reservation only, once per week, one hour per session).

Apart from the S$500K cards, I don’t think there’s any other option that provides a similar benefit.

Dodged a bullet on the Membership Rewards devaluation!

When I cancelled my AMEX Platinum Charge, one of the last things I did was to transfer a big chunk of Membership Rewards points to airline miles, in order to take advantage of the superior conversion rate (400 MR points = 250 miles, compared to 450 MR points = 250 miles for other AMEX cards).

That turned out to be oddly prescient, because American Express devalued Membership Rewards points in February this year, increasing the cost of airline miles conversions by 22-25% (or 44-50% for Emirates Skywards).

The dust has more or less settled by now, but the lasting legacy is that the earn rates on the AMEX Platinum Charge (and all other AMEX cards, for that matter) are worse than ever before.

	Till 22 Feb 26	From 23 Feb 26
General Spend 2 MR points per S$1.60	0.78 mpd	0.63 mpd
Singapore Airlines and Scoot 5 MR points per S$1.60	1.95 mpd	1.56 mpd
10Xcelerator 20 MR points per S$1.60	7.81 mpd	6.25 mpd

To be fair, American Express has tried to placate cardholders with a year-long promotion that boosts the FCY earn rate to 2.2 mpd, but there’s a cap of S$15,000, and you could earn more with other (cheaper) cards anyway.

Basically, the only scenarios where you should be swiping an AMEX card are: 

• 10Xcelerator merchants
• AMEX Offers
• Chillax & Love Dining
• Table for Two
• Using the S$800 statement credits

I didn’t zero out my MR balance completely, as I wanted to retain some points for transfers to hotel programmes (which were untouched by the devaluation). However, I’m glad I had the time to properly think this through, because there was a bit of a panic when the news hit, as cardholders had just one month to figure out what to do with years of accumulated points. 

No more Centurion Lounges…

I know the Centurion Lounges catch a lot of flak for being overcrowded, but maybe I was just lucky, because my experiences with them were always very pleasant.

Over the years I visited the lounges in Hong Kong, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Seattle, and I find myself missing them very much,  especially when I’m travelling in Economy and walk past one en route to some mediocre Priority Pass lounge.

…but also no more hobbled Priority Pass

One thing I definitely don’t miss about the AMEX Platinum Charge is its hobbled Priority Pass, which ever since August 2019 has barred members from so-called non-lounge airport experiences.

This meant that airport restaurants are off limits, as well as sleep pods, video game lounges, and anything that isn’t a lounge in the traditional sense of the word.

I get that this restriction is in place to combat overuse (since people are more likely to redeem multiple meals or spa treatments than lounge access), but it’s still frustrating, because sometimes the lounges are simply too crowded, or perhaps you want a proper cooked meal instead of a lukewarm buffet spread.

So I’m much happier with my HSBC Premier Mastercard, which gives me (and three supplementary cardholders) an unlimited-visit Priority Pass, with no such restrictions. 

Would I ever return?

Even though I do miss some of the benefits, I’ll say that on the whole, I feel pretty good about my decision to drop the AMEX Platinum Charge.

The two things I value the most, Love Dining and lounge access, have been replaced by alternative cards, and while it’s hard to recreate the “social aspect” of membership (the events, the member-only spaces, the collective catharsis of grumbling with 6,000+ other cardmembers in the AMEX Platinum chat), I’m not prepared to pay S$1,744 for that.

I’m not ruling out a return, but it certainly won’t happen at least until I’m eligible for another welcome offer. The current welcome offer for existing AMEX customers (98,250 bonus MR points for spending S$3,000) is available to anyone who hasn’t cancelled an AMEX Platinum Charge in the past 12 months. That means I’ll need to wait until October 2026, and see what the offer is like then.

Conclusion

It’s been six months since I parted ways with the AMEX Platinum Charge, and while there’s certain aspects of the card I miss, it’s refreshing not to have to plan my life around it anymore.

Perhaps the biggest annoyance of no longer having an AMEX Platinum Charge is that it’s a lot harder to cover card-related content, since I’m no longer receiving the eDMs, and have lost access to benefits-related information on the AMEX Experiences app!

Ex-AMEX Platinum Chargers: what’s life been like?