Adios, Amex Platinum: A Breakup Letter That Was a Long Time Coming
Every relationship has a tipping point. A moment where you look across the table, tally up what you're giving versus what you're getting, and realise that the other party has been quietly coasting on historical goodwill while systematically dismantling everything that made the arrangement worthwhile in the first place.
Batty and the American Express Platinum Card have reached that moment.
It wasn't one thing. It never is. It was the slow, deliberate drip of benefit cuts, the creative accounting required to justify a €690 annual fee, and — the detail that finally made Batty put the card down and back away slowly — a 2% foreign currency conversion fee in an era where the competition is quite literally charging nothing.
Let's do the post-mortem properly.
€690 a Year. Per Year. Every Year.
That is the annual fee for the Amex Platinum in Austria. Six hundred and ninety euros. Batty is not going to pretend that premium cards don't cost money — they do, and a certain amount of fee is entirely reasonable for a well-structured product. But €690 demands a level of benefit delivery that Amex Austria has been struggling to provide for some time.
The card's defenders will point to the offset credits: €360 in annual restaurant credit, €180 in entertainment allowance. So on paper you can argue the "effective" fee drops to around €150 if you max everything out. This is true in the same way that a hotel advertising a €400/night suite as "effectively €200" after you factor in the spa credit that's only valid on Tuesdays during a full moon is technically true. It requires effort, attention, and a willingness to spend money you might not otherwise spend in order to unlock savings on money you've already spent.
Batty is a pilot. Batty understands checklists. But a credit card should not require a checklist to justify its own existence.
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The Hotel Programme That Quietly Left the Building
Here's the thing about premium credit cards: they used to come with genuinely useful hotel partnerships. The kind where a piece of plastic got you access to status levels that otherwise required sleeping in hotel beds for 50 nights a year. The Amex Platinum was once rather good at this.
The Shangri-La Golden Circle Jade membership — which delivered complimentary breakfast, room upgrades, and late checkout across one of the finest hotel groups on earth — vanished in 2021. Quietly. Without much of a fanfare. The cooperation simply wasn't renewed, and Shangri-La wandered off to partner with other programmes more interested in maintaining the relationship.
And here's the thing: Batty has flown enough, slept in enough hotel rooms across Asia and Europe, and accumulated enough loyalty points across enough programmes that the hotel status benefits on the Amex Platinum are now, to be blunt, redundant. The remaining hotel partnerships are with chains where Batty already holds a considerably higher status through direct loyalty. Showing up with an Amex-courtesy Silver tier at a property where you're already Gold or Platinum is not a benefit. It is the card equivalent of bringing a sandwich to a restaurant and asking for a bread basket.
The Fine Hotels + Resorts programme still exists and still delivers some value for specific bookings. This is acknowledged. But it is a tool for a particular type of trip, not the flexible everyday advantage that broad hotel status partnerships once provided.
Lufthansa Lounges: Also Leaving. Also Very Amex.
The cooperation with Lufthansa — which gave Platinum cardholders access to Business and Senator Lounges — is ending on September 30, 2026. Not renewed. Another partnership quietly winding down, another line item quietly disappearing from the benefits brochure.
This is a pattern, and patterns are informative.
The 2% Foreign Currency Fee: The One That Actually Did It
Batty travels frequently. Batty pays for things in currencies that are not euros. This is an unavoidable feature of visiting places like Thailand, the United Kingdom, the United States, and anywhere else that has declined to adopt the euro as its monetary unit.
The Amex Platinum charges 2% on every non-euro transaction. On a €3,000 foreign spend — a fairly modest travel month by Batty's standards — that is €60 in conversion fees. Silently extracted. Added to the bill. A tithe paid to the altar of American Express for the privilege of spending your own money in another country.
Meanwhile, Revolut exists.
Batty uses Revolut. The free version — which costs nothing, zero, €0 per year — charges no foreign exchange fees on transactions during the week. The interbank rate, applied directly, no markup, no 2% surcharge, no creative arithmetic. At weekends there is a small fee, because Revolut's free tier applies a modest weekend surcharge. But for anyone who can be bothered to upgrade to Revolut's paid tier — which costs a fraction of what Amex charges — weekend FX fees disappear entirely.
This is not a complicated comparison. One product charges 2% to spend your money abroad. Another charges nothing. The first product costs €690 a year. The second costs either nothing or a modest annual fee. Batty is a connaisseur of many things, but is not required to be a connaisseur of being overcharged for currency conversion.
The Trajectory Is The Point
There is a version of this story where the benefit cuts stop, where new partnerships replace the old ones, where the €690 is supported by a product that genuinely earns it. Batty would happily tell that story.
But the trajectory of the Amex Platinum in Austria over the past several years has been consistently in one direction: benefits out, fees in. Shangri-La gone. Lufthansa lounges going. Further cuts rumoured and apparently confirmed in circulation. Each individual cut is presented as an isolated business decision. Taken together, they describe a product in managed decline, extracting maximum fee revenue while systematically reducing what that fee actually buys.
The credits and the lounges and the remaining hotel benefits still exist, technically. But a premium product that justifies its price primarily by pointing to credits that offset part of its own fee is a product that has run out of arguments.
What Happens Now
The card is cancelled. The metal goes back. The Membership Rewards points have been transferred to something more useful.
The travel continues. The lounge access continues — through airline status, through independent lounge memberships, through the kind of direct programme loyalty that doesn't require a third party to negotiate on your behalf. The hotel upgrades continue, through programmes that Batty actually has meaningful status in.
The foreign exchange fees stop. Immediately. That alone will pay for Revolut's annual fee several times over within the first month of travel.
Sometimes the cleanest move is the simplest one. The Amex Platinum was, for a while, genuinely excellent. The product that exists now in Austria in 2026 is a different thing wearing the same name — and at €690 a year, it no longer passes the basic test of being worth it.
Adios, Platinum. It was, at one point, a pleasure.
Next stop: finding a card that actually earns its keep. Batty will report back.