AMEX Event 21/09/10

Sep 22 9:17 pm

DelonFinance, Food No Comments

So after the already awesome Hooters dinner with friends on Monday, I went to an even MORE awesome AMEX event where the new Gold Rewards Card is announced.

At the beginning, I was in a little trouble because the taxi I called was like 5 minutes late, and to make it worst it went to the wrong street orz. Good thing I sorta predicted that so I ran to the street instead of waiting for him to search and come again. Once I got on the taxi, TRAFFIC JAM. But well, I mean it’s natural that traffic sucks at 6 pm lol. It was fun to see that meter jump every 29-30 seconds. The site is a little hard to find for some reason but I arrived around 10 minutes late. It’s not that bad as most of the travel bloggers arrived even later xD At the end, the trip costed $85 and that’s not even including tip. Good thing AMEX paid for it else…I will be driving the cab lol.

Once I went in, I was introduced to a number of AMEX employees, and we talked about the AMEX 2% cashback card, AMEX vs other companies’ credit cards and “blow water”. Get some wine to drink. But I was looking for tonight’s star aka the host~

The host is the famous Julia Dimon, who has travelled around the world 4 times (heck, I have only travelled to around 4 countries myself my whole life so far orz) and is a self-proclaimed “Travel Junkie”. It was funny the moment we met because she asked me what I did last night. And guess what? I told her about Hooters xDDDDDDDDD I have to admit, I am a little nervous talking to her at the beginning (as I do when I meet famous ppl, orz), but that surely broke the ice. It also helps that she will be seating beside me for the dinner. Trust me, it was….WOW. What makes the event more fun is AMEX registered a Twitter Hashtag, and whatever tweets used that tag will appear on the overhead, which is right beside my table. I was tweeting almost nonstop (heck, I even tweeted my wine count) and had lots of fun. Good thing that I also brought my 4 AMEX cards, and we also talked about collecting travel points (right up my alley). Julia then talked about her travelling experiences along with her pain on redeeming her points, then Clayon from AMEX Marketing introducted the card. I will talk about this card next paragraph. Afterwards, it was food, tweets and more pics. I took quite alot of pics with the ladies and took 2 with Julia!!!!!!!!!!!!! At the end of the night, my wine count was 4 red and 8 red. xDDDDDDD I even tweeted about it hahahahhaha

So about the card, as I mentioned above it’s called the Gold Rewards Card. It comes with travel insurance, actually quite alot of them:
o 15-day Out of Province/Country Emergency Medical Insurance
o Trip Interruption Insurance
o Car Rental Theft and Damage Insurance
o $500,000 Travel Accident Insurance
o Lost or Stolen Baggage Insurance
o Baggage Delay Insurance
o Flight Delay Insurance
o Hotel/Motel Burglary Insurance
o Travel Emergency Assistance

And on the rewards side, the card gives you $1 per point and 2 points per $1 when you buy travel or shop at grocery/drugstores and gas stations. You can redeem them for travel starting at 1000 points for $10 cashback. So that’s around 1-2% cashback which is not too bad. The Cap One Aspire gives you 1.5-2% so the AMEX is on par. However, AMEX TripFlex allows you to take 12 months to redeem for the trip which is AMAZING. So basically you can book the trip in January Year 1, and you can save points throughout the ENTIRE year, then redeem them against that in January Year 2. GOD DAMN AMAZING! Cap One Aspire only gives you up to 90 days iirc. Another huge negative is the Aspire won’t let you get the FULL 2% until you have enough points to cover the entire trip. I want to be able to get full redemption value whenever I book a trip, and NOT to book a trip only when I know I get full redemption value.

And if you don’t want to redeem those points for cashback, you can actually transfer them to Aeroplan, BA, Asia Miles which is a HUGE PLUS in my books. However, I am also wondering if we can actually transfer all those aeroplan/BA/asia miles to AMEX points? Hmmm…

The only bad thing is this card is going to have an annual fee (I don’t know how much yet), and hopefully you get bonuses when you are approved for the card and annual bonuses. It also helps if the annual fee is not too high as well~ But all I know right now is I am going to get this card once it’s avaliable xDDDDD

BTW for pics of the event, pls check my fb! ;)

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