Rapid Travel Chai

The Amex SPG personal card permanently closes to new applicants on February 13, 2019. Existing cardholders will have their card rebranded to the Marriott Bonvoy Amex card with eye of the beholder, retro ’90s card art.

Irrelevant sidebar: take a look at the artist that produced this design and tell me it is not Drew trolling Amex, Marriott, and all of us.

We spoke to the artist behind the limited-edition Bonvoy Amex design. 💳

Here’s a closer look: https://t.co/Fo5cI2An3K pic.twitter.com/IZHOI7QIAy

— The Points Guy (@thepointsguy) January 30, 2019

I’d like to have the card for the annual free night certificates (valid at hotels with standard awards up to 35,000 points/night) even though I am ineligible for the sign-up bonus.

I’ve got 5 Amex credit cards and they currently won’t approve me for a new one unless I close an exisiting account. I am not at the moment in those annual cycles that I want to drop a card.

I’ve also not yet had the SPG Luxury card which is crying out for a relaunch with better sign-up bonus to convince customers to tolerate the alliterative new name of Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant Amex card.

A Brilliant Downgrade

My long-held assumption was that the Marriott Bonvoy Amex will live on as a downgrade option for those no longer wanting to be Brilliant.

I don’t have pull with Marriott or Amex PR so I did the next best thing – for months I pestered Greg and Frequent Miler to get him to pester Marriott and Amex for an answer. Greg duly complied and got an affirmative answer a couple weeks ago.

I’ll wait for an attractive Brilliant offer. For a bit of a dud card they should match the 150,000 point offers we’ve seen on the Amex Hilton Aspire. Then I’ll keep the Brilliant for a year, scoop up the 50,000 points/night anniversary certificate, and downgrade out of Brilliant.

By that time, we can hope the limited edition card art on the Bonvoy is out of stock.