How do you get the employee offer?

From time to time Amex runs employee card promotions for BBP, Biz Gold, and Biz Plat. “Add an employee card for your business card, and spend a minimum of X amount for Yk rewards” is their promo. The latest promo ended recently.

The offers range from $50 for $1,000 spend to 20k for $4,000 spend. They all have a timeframe of 6 months for the spend.

When they run these promos, the promo landing pages appear on this predictable URL pattern:

Replace the words inside the URL to say business-gold or business-platinum for the other variations.

When applying for the employee card, you can choose the $50 annual fee card or the $0 annual fee “employee expense” card, and either card qualifies for the promo.

If you see a “We’re having trouble finding the page you’re looking for.” message, it means that specific promo is not running at this moment.

Apparently people get targeted for these promos, but when they do, they realize that anyone who has one of these cards can apply for the promo. So they share the links on reddit.

Sometimes the links don’t work for people. Specifically, they see the promo landing page, but when they hit “apply”, the employee application page doesn’t load. In that case, you have to “spin off your amex user login” for the promo to work. Remove your BizGold (or what business card where you want to get the employee card) from your Amex login, and sign up for a new Amex user account. Then add your Bizgold card to that Amex user account. Then the application page works. Also, sometimes Amex takes a very long time – 2+ weeks – to approve and send you the employee card.

The best part is that when you are spending towards the minimum spend of the main card ($10,000 for Biz Gold, $15,000 for Biz Platinum, $15,000 for BBP, etc) during your initial 3-month period, your spend towards minimum spend also counts towards the employee card minimum spend, if you do the spend on the employee card. So instead of 150k for $10,000 spend, if you are able to get 2 employee cards (one for P1 and one for P2) before you started heavily spending, you could in theory:

  • spend $2,000 in main card before you get the employee cards (or not)

  • $4,000 on employee card 1 for 20k

  • $4,000 on employee card 2 for 20k

For a total of 190k for $10,000 spend on the BizGold.

Sometimes it’s possible that people click on a link from the promo page but end up in the wrong application, (so for example they click on 20k for $4,000 spend, but end up in the application page for 7k for $4,000 spend), which is a mistake on Amex’s part when they built these promo pages. So you also have to watch for the POID code at the bottom of the application page. Which promo applies to which POID is a data point that is not tracked well on this subreddit, as most people do fine without it. In January, a lot of people who applied for 15k ended up getting the 7k version. But in general people have refrained from complaining to Amex about these errors to not draw attention to the fact that people are applying to them for churning.

The offers were around in October-November last year, gone for a bit in December, and came back in January and ended last week.

P2 got a BizGold last October, and we managed to squeeze two employee cards. P1 got a BizGold in December, and we only got to add one employee card (since we were already at $5,000 spend when I saw the January offer), resulting in:

  • 190k for $11,000 spend (150+20+20)

  • 170k for $10,500 spend (130+25 referral+15)

I also got BBP 75k+$50 P1 employee (the employee card got cancelled because I forgot to activate. But I think I received and kept the $50 offer regardless) + 7k P2 employee (used the right landing page but the wrong app link apparently) + 15k P1 employee (applied after they cancelled my first one, we’ll see) for $15,000 spend, but I got the last P1 card very late so it will end up being about $17k-$18k spend.