Activate Your American Express Platinum Card Benefits for Travel, Lifestyle, and More: A 2024 Guide

19.07.2024 - 08:50 / insider.com / Express

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The Platinum Card® from American Express has one of the highest annual fees of any publicly available consumer card: $695. However, the card's perks can more than outweigh the annual cost for the right cardholder. Some benefits automatically come with the card, while other perks require enrollment before you can access their value.

Earn 5X Membership Rewards® Points for flights booked directly with airlines or with American Express Travel (on up to $500,000 per calendar year) and on prepaid hotels booked with American Express Travel. Earn 1X Points on other purchases.

$695

N/A

See Pay Over Time APR

Earn 80,000 Membership Rewards® points

Good to Excellent

If you want as many premium travel perks as possible, The Platinum Card® from American Express could be the right card for you. The annual fee is high, but you get a long list of benefits such as airport lounge access, travel statement credits, complimentary hotel elite status, and more.

Some of the Amex Platinum's best benefits must be activated before you can use them. To ensure you don't miss out, here's what you should do as soon as you get your card to make the most of it.

One of the biggest perks of the Amex Platinum Card is a yearly airline incidental fee credit. Every calendar year, you can designate a single airline on which you can get up to $200 in fees reimbursed as a statement credit when you use your card for the purchase**.

While the fee credit doesn't include airfare, it covers incidental expenses like checked bags, flight-change fees, inflight food and drinks, fees for traveling with a pet, lounge day passes (for lounges you don't already have access to), or seat assignments and extra legroom upgrade fees.

You can take advantage of this benefit twice in your first year of card ownership because you get the $200 airline credit once per calendar year instead of on a rolling basis calculated from your cardholder anniversary. For example:

This means you can get up to $400 in value from this credit in your first year.

To designate your airline, call the number on the back of your card or log in to your online account. If you're not sure which airline to choose because you don't have travel plans yet, you can make the selection when you're ready.

Once you've made your choice, you can change it online or by phone each January; after January 31, you're locked in with that airline until the end of the year.

Quick tip: Consider using this credit on an airline