{"id":6451,"date":"2023-02-24T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-02-24T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/?p=6451"},"modified":"2023-06-06T09:36:23","modified_gmt":"2023-06-06T15:36:23","slug":"what-to-do-with-orphan-membership-rewards-accounts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/24\/what-to-do-with-orphan-membership-rewards-accounts\/","title":{"rendered":"Weekend Wisdom: What to do with Orphan Membership Rewards Accounts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>Editor\u2019s Note: I\u2019ll be traveling through the end of February and be largely unresponsive in normal channels, please expect delays.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Introduction<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>American Express&#8217;s Membership Rewards program has a few quirks:<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>A single cardholder can have multiple Membership Rewards accounts<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Opening a new Membership Rewards account can be done over the phone<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Having multiple Membership Rewards accounts side-skirts annual limits, like the 35% Business Platinum Airline rebate&#8217;s cap of 1 million points per year<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Normally getting into the weeds of Membership Rewards points isn&#8217;t part of a churner&#8217;s toolkit though, because dealing with multiple pools is hard, cash out mechanisms like the <a href=\"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/2021\/10\/13\/reminder-cashing-out-amex-membership-rewards\/?utm_source=mailpoet&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=miles-earn-and-burn-daily-newsletter_1\" class=\"ek-link\">Schwab 1.1 cents per point method<\/a> only work with points in the same pool, and customer service reps often don&#8217;t understand that multiple accounts can exist normally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Buggening<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Even if you never intended to have multiple Membership Rewards accounts, you still might &#8212; between October and mid-December of last year, bugs in American Express&#8217;s systems caused many newly approved Business Platinum and Business Gold cards to be issued with a separate account than the one already established for that cardholder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>The good news? It&#8217;s fixable:\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>First, collect all of your Membership Rewards account numbers in one of three ways:<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Grab the numbers from <a href=\"https:\/\/awardwallet.com\/\" class=\"ek-link\">awardwallet<\/a> after linking your account<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Find a competent Membership Rewards agent on the phone and ask<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>(advanced) Look in your browser&#8217;s developer tools at XHR requests and pull them out of the responses<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Next, call the number of the back of your card, then ask to be transferred to the Membership Rewards team NOTE: This team is only available Monday &#8211; Friday during regular US business hours<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Third, ask the team to move your points from one account to the other<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Wait a day and ensure the move completed<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Get back in touch with the Membership Rewards team after the move has occurred and ask them to combine the two accounts<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>If you don&#8217;t go in the above order, you may get unlucky and have Membership Rewards lost in the ether that will take weeks or moths to unravel, so be careful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Good luck!<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image is-style-editorskit-rounded\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full is-resized\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/bug-on-pcb.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-6464\" width=\"420\" srcset=\"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/bug-on-pcb.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/bug-on-pcb-300x300.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/bug-on-pcb-150x150.jpeg 150w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\" style=\"font-size:14px\">The source of the\u00a0Membership\u00a0Rewards\u00a0separate account bug that haunted new cardholders last year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Editor\u2019s Note: I\u2019ll be traveling through the end of February and be largely unresponsive in normal channels, please expect delays. Introduction American Express&#8217;s Membership Rewards<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_editorskit_title_hidden":false,"_editorskit_reading_time":1,"_editorskit_is_block_options_detached":false,"_editorskit_block_options_position":"{}","footnotes":""},"categories":[54,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-credit-cards","category-wisdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6451"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7757,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6451\/revisions\/7757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}