In the middle of July American Express released nearly a dozen new amazing welcome bonus offers on a wide selection of their cards. Of those offers there are five 110,000 point bonuses available but there is one of them that is easier and faster to achieve than the rest of them. That one is the 110,000 welcome bonus points offer on the Business Platinum Card® from American Express
The reason behind it being one of the easiest and fasted to achieve is that the entire bonus is awarded once you complete the required spend within the first three months of having the card. The other offers require up to 6 months and/or you have to also spend a certain amount in select categories. Not to take away from those offers as they are great but those additional spend requirements or timelines are not required with the Business Platinum Card from American Express!
As a small business card it is open to applications from sole proprietorships (your SIN works as your business number), partnerships, corporations and so on. Like all American Express cards there is no minimum annual income requirement.
TIP: You can also apply for this card as an individual without having a small business. Simply use your SIN as the business number.
The welcome bonus:
Earn a welcome bonus of 110,000 Membership Rewards® points when you
spend $7,000 in purchases within the first three months of
Cardmembership. The points are typically awarded a few days after you hit that spend requirement so if you manage to spend $7,000 on the your card in the first two weeks then you should have all the points by week three!
What can you get with this bonus?
110,000 Membership Rewards Points is no laughing matter. That is a lot of points with a lot of value. Add in your $7,000 of spending that earn 1.25 points per dollar and three months in you are sitting at no less than 118,750 points. Here are just a few examples of what you can use that amount of points for and the value from them:
Use points for purchases
The simplest most straightforward redemption, you can use the points to redeem for a statement credit towards almost any purchases you make on the card including travel purchases that you make yourself. You can redeem 1,000 points for $10. With 118,750 points that’s $1,187.50 in statement credits.
Fixed points for travel
With fixed points for travel you have Amex’s traditional frequent flyer program award chart style of reward. These are the charts for economy and business class:
With 118,750 points you could redeem for seven round trip flights on the ‘popular short haul’ route options with a maximum pre-tax ticket price of $300 each. If you can redeem for tickets at $300 each you have $2,100 in value! Likewise you can see some other high value options with up to $1,700 for one round trip ticket to Africa, Asia, Australia etc. or one round trip flight to Europe along with one in North America for providing up to $1,700 in value as well. In general you have lots of options here but you’ll want to try to redeem as close to maximum ticket value as possible to extract the most value from your points.
Convert points to travel partners:
The option that has the potential to provide the most value of all is converting the points to Amex’s airline and hotel partners and redeeming for tickets via that program. The most popular are Air Canada Aeroplan which is a 1:1 transfer ratio, British Airways Executive Club which is also 1:1 and Marriott Bonvoy which is a 1 to 1.2 ratio. Here are just two examples showing the value of converting points to the travel partners:
British Airways Executive Club
How about a trip to Dublin from Toronto in Business Class on British Airway’s partner Aer Lingus? This is for September 20 to October 6. You would need 100,000 Avios (100,000 Membership Rewards points) and pay $1,110.91 in taxes and fees. Is it worth it? Yes, check this out:
The screenshot of the reward ticket from British Airways Executive Club showing 100,000 Avios and the $1110.91 in fees. Here’s the price of the ticket from Aer Lingus:
If you wanted to pay cash for this same flight it would be $4,195.78. Take away the $1,110.91 you have to pay on the award ticket and the 100,000 Membership Rewards points you used to convert to Avios are worth $3084.87 in this example. That gives you a value of 3.08 cents per point making your 118,750 points that you earned to get this bonus worth $3,663.28! Subtract the annual fee of $499 and you are still at $3,164.28 in value! If that isn’t incentive enough to give this card serious consideration I don’t know what is.
Marriott Bonvoy
How about a two night stay at the brand new W Toronto? For September 30 to October 2 you would need to redeem 114,000 Marriott Bonvoy points (95,000 Membership Rewards points) for this two night stay:
And the same room if you were to pay cash?
So here you are receiving $1806.28 in value from the card and you’ll still have 23,750 points left over! If we take the cents per point value of 1.9 cents your 118,750 Membership Rewards points would be worth $2,257.85. Subtract the annual fee of $499 and you are still at $1758.85 in value!
Recommended reading: Business Platinum Card® from American Express Review
Wrapping it up
Right now you have quite a few options to score a lot of points with Amex’s various increased welcome bonus offers but none of them will come to you as quickly or easily as the offer for the Business Platinum Card from American Express. And in this post we only focused on a closer look at the welcome bonus – the card offers much more beyond the points that makes paying $499 per year more than worth it including business class lounge access, discounts on premium class flights, and many other benefits
Click here to learn more and/or to apply for this card.
This post was NOT sponsored by any of the companies mentioned within. All opinions are strictly those of Rewards Canada
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