American Express Green Card UK Review – Why you should avoid!
Is the Amex Green Card Worth It?
With the ability to convert points earned from an American Express credit card to 12 airlines and various hotel schemes, it’s no surprise that Amex cards regularly make an appearance on Thrifty Points.
However one card that rarely gets featured is the American Express Green card UK and there’s a good reason for this… The Amex Green card offers terrible value for money when compared to many others offered by American Express as we’ll cover in full within this article!
As always let’s start with some of the boring but important bits. The American Express Green card is issued by American Express as a charge card – this means that it needs to be paid back in full at the end of each month. Late payments are subject to a fee of £12 per month.
Other Benefits of the Amex Green Card UK?
Anything Else I Should Know About the American Express Green Card UK?
Ways to Use Green Card American Express Reward Points?
Ordinarily the Amex Green card UK does not offer new customers a sign-up bonus. However if you’re referred by an existing cardholder you’ll earn a very measly 2,000 Membership Rewards points when you spend £1,000 in the first 3 months. This is shown highlighted red in the screenshot below.
If you’d like to be referred (we wouldn’t recommend it!) we’d be delighted if you’d use our link found here which will allow you to earn a further 2,000 Membership Rewards points when you sign up to the American Express Green card.
So how does this sign-up bonus compare to other credit cards? The big brother of the Amex Green card is the American Express Gold card – reviewed here (SPOILER ALERT: this card is better in nearly every way!). The Gold version is free for the first year and offers a very generous sign-up bonus to all new customer of 20,000 points – yes 10 times the amount if you’re referred to the Amex Green card! What makes this even better is that the sign-up bonus can be increased to 22,000 points if you use this link.
Earn 1 Membership Rewards Point for Every £1 Spent – This is a similar earning rate to both the Gold and Platinum cards, however the mathematicians out there will have worked out that you’d need to spend £20,000 on the American Express Green card to just equal the sign-up bonus offered by the Gold card! For those able to spend this much on a credit card you may well find our BA First Class review interesting, where we spent less than £20,000 across 3 credit cards and received enough points for two free First Class flights which would have cost £16,000!
So how does this sign-up bonus compare to other credit cards? The Gold version offers two free airport lounge passes and free bedroom upgrade and $75 hotel credit for hotels booked through the American Express Hotel Collection.
There is no longer a minimum income requirement for any American Express credit cards.
Finally, and as we mentioned earlier, American Express have recently changed the rules surrounding the sign-up bonuses with their credit cards. If you’ve held a personal credit card in the last 24 months you’re unable to benefit from the (poor!) sign-up bonus with the American Express Green card.
As we discussed in our recent article here, American Express Membership Rewards points vary in value anywhere from 0.45p per point (if used against your card statement) to as much as 3.2p which I recently achieved on a British Airways flight.
So how would we recommend using your points? This is dependent on various factors. As such there’s no ‘one size fits all’ approach that can be adopted. However your worst-case scenario should be redeeming against your card statement at 0.45p or vouchers at 0.5p. The American Express shopping page offers a poorer rate than this and as such should be ignored.
Redeeming for hotel stays can provide reasonable value ranging between 0.6p (Hilton) to 1.2p (Radisson). For those who fly with British Airways, we would usually recommend converting Membership Rewards points to Avios. This tends to provide a value somewhere in the region of 1p per point and as much as 3.2p, as I achieved in a recent flight to Edinburgh.
So is the Amex Green Card worth it?
What is the American Express Green card limit?
With an annual fee of £60, no sign-up bonus and limited additional benefits, unsurprisingly the American Express Green card hasn’t had much exposure on Thrifty Points. As we’ve seen you’d be better off signing up to the ‘premium’ version of the card which is free for the first year, offers an enhanced sign-up bonus and additional benefits. You can increase the sign-up bonus from 20,000 points to 22,000 using this link. We would recommend cancelling the card at the end of the first year to avoid the £140 annual fee.
If you’d still like to sign up to the Amex Green card don’t forget you can benefit from a sign-up bonus of 2,000 points using this referral link.
As always, we hope you’ve enjoyed this American Express Green card review and we’d love to hear any thoughts you may have in the comments section below….