Linking corporate rewards and personal rewards

[simongr]

Hi all
First post here so hopefully this hasnt been posted elsewhere. I have a personal Amex Gold Charge Card with Ascent rewards paid for. I recently changed jobs and now have a corporate Amex card. I am trying to work out whether I need to pay for a separate rewards program membership for my corporate card and if so which of the two levels of reward I should get.
Sadly my flights (and everyone in the local business) are charged to the CEO's corporate card so that they accumulate points (for subsequent) corporate points. I am only going to be travelling once every couple of months so probably only about A$15,000 a year in charges to the card so I dont think its worth even trying to link the two cards.
I cant use my personal card for travel as I have to use corporate Amex.
Any thoughts?
Cheers
S

 

[Maca44]

Welcome to AFF Simongr,

It would appear your CEO has things worked out just fine for him/herself and he/she will earn the points for any purchases made by employees, and if I was in that position I would probably do the same. However, if you are not going to earn points for purchases on the corporate card then you would not earn any ff points for those purchases in any event. You have accent rewards for your personal card and from what I can see that is all the points you will earn on either card, namely personal use.

I assume that if your CEO is getting the points then he/she won't allow employees to put any company purchases on personal Amex cards so it would appear you are stuck with earning points on 'your' card only, for personal use.

Even if the cost of your flights is charged to the CEO's card you will still earn ff points for the actual flight, and you can put your ff number into the system at check in.

 

[simongr]

Its only the flight charges that the CEO earns points on. Basically the costs are charged to their card directly rather than to the employee cards. Its fine for me to accumulate points on my corporate card (hotel, food, taxi charges whilst travelling) I just dont think that I will earn enough points on my corporate card to warrant the expense.

Its a bit rough actually given that I pay $190 for the Gold Card, $65 for my wife's card, $80 for Ascent rewards and I cant link my other card.... seems odd that they have linked my accounts for online balances etc. but wont do it for this.

 

[dajop]

OK - so forget linking your Personal Amex rewards program & your corporate card as it can't happen.

So then it sounds like you're asking is it worthwhile to pay $80/annum on the card for membership of Ascent when you're only spending $15K/annum on the card. Is that correct?

Ascent gives you access to frequent guest and frequent flyer programs, the most notable being QF FF. So for $80/year you get 15,000 FF points. Almost enough to get a Melb-Syd return (for example) which at the moment costs around $140 net of taxes. Or you could after 4 years and $320 spend it on East coast - Asia return in economy worth around $700 or so net of taxes. Value gets better if you can use for upgrades.

Another options for 15,000 pts = 4,950 Starwood points, which will get you at least 3 nights every 2 years at quite a few Sheratons.

Sounds like there may be some benefit to it, especially if you need the points to top up what you earn elsewhere to get a decent rewards, but if not may be almost paying for points.

 

[simongr]

Bump

Just wanted to share some good news on this. I missed setting up membership rewards on my corporate Amex and only got round to it after I had charged A$16k to the card. I phoned up a few weeks ago and they "we dont back date membership - but fax us your statements with a justification and we will see what we can do".

Well I faxed off my reasons (being that I hadnt had good advice initially from Amex and I plan to spend about A$8K/month across the two cards) and waited and waited and today I saw my MR balance on my corporate card jump to 20K+ points

Good work Amex