Amex Launches Rewards Reference Site

Keeping track of which specific benefits, bonus spending categories, and other perks each of your credit cards carries can be a daunting task, especially for points newbies, but also for more experienced hands. Many of my big day-to-day decisions revolve around which card to put which expenses on depending not only on how many points I’ll earn but also other factors like purchase protection and other insurance.

To help its cardholders keep track of which merchant categories their individual credit cards earn multiple points per dollar on, American Express has launched a new site intended to be a single resource where cardholders can search by merchant category to find out which cards earn what bonuses on which expenses.

For example, in the Travel Rewards category, you can find out that the category definition of airfare must be for a scheduled flight on a passenger carrier and purchased directly from the airline and that charter and private jet flights are excluded, and that you will not earn additional rewards on airfare purchased as part of a vacation package nor if you purchase the airfare through a third party. Then it lists which cards earn bonus rewards on this category including the Premier Rewards Gold and certain versions of the Business Gold Rewards card.

Or for another example, that the cards that earn bonus rewards at US restaurants include the Hilton HHonors Card, the Hilton Surpass Card, the Blue Sky Preferred Card and several more.

While I appreciate that Amex has put all this information in one easy-to-use place, I do think they could work on the interface to make it more navigable, as well as adding more information to the site including how many bonus points each card earns in each category. It doesn’t specify the earning rates of specific cards now and stipulates that you must look at your cardmember agreement and benefits pack. Still, it’s a start, though I look forward to the day when a solution, like the proposed Wallaby Card, will do the thinking for us and decide which card to use for which purchase automatically.

Disclaimer: This content is not provided or commissioned by the credit card issuer. Opinions expressed here are author.s alone, not those of the credit card issuer, and have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by the credit card issuer. This site may be compensated through the credit card issuer Affiliate Program.