Change Your Designated Airline for Amex Statement Credits by the End of January

Update: Some offers mentioned below are no longer available. View the current offers here.

One of the many valuable perks offered by Amex credit cards is the annual airline travel credit. A number of Amex cards come with this credit, including the American Express® Gold Card, the Platinum Card® from American Express, the Business Platinum Card® from American Express, the Hilton Honors American Express Aspire Card and both the personal and business versions of the Centurion card.

With the annual airline travel credits from Amex, you select an eligible airline and receive the specified amount of money in statement credits to cover fees such as checked bags, inflight purchases and change fees. Here's what each of the cards mentioned above gets up to annually for airline travel credits:

• Amex Gold Card — $100
• Amex Platinum Card — $200
• Amex Business Platinum Card — $200
• Hilton Honors American Express Aspire Card — $250
• Amex Centurion Cards — $200

The eligible airlines include Alaska, American, Delta, Frontier, Hawaiian, JetBlue, Spirit, Southwest and United.

In order to take advantage of the statement credit, you must select the airline with which you want to spend it. If you already have an eligible Amex card and are looking to change the airline you want to use the statement credit with (you can change this once a year), you must do so by the end of the month — Jan. 31 — by logging in to your account and selecting the airline. If you don't want to change your preferred airline, you don't need to do anything — last year's selection will carry over.

Unfortunately, these statement credits can't be applied directly to airfare, however, they can save you on other incidentals, and with some airlines you can buy gift cards and trigger the statement credit, effectively allowing you to purchase airfare with one extra step involved. If you plan on changing your airline, don't forget to do so by the end of the month.