Accidentally Triggered
A few days ago, I was approved for a new AMEX Business Gold credit card. One of the biggest perks of this card is that when you refer a friend, you can receive a one-time 20,000 MR. Right now, the 50,000 welcome bonus is only available through a refer link. Quick application link: AMEX Business Gold Rewards Card. [Warning: If your situation is not appropriate for business activity, I do not recommend applying for a business credit card.]
First, here is some background on my situation (these details may be why I was able to trigger double enrollment?):
- I applied for the card in early September and still had not received the physical card.
- It had already been added to my AMEX account, and I was able to add AMEX Offers.
- My Biz card and personal cards are under the same AMEX account.
- Since the card still had not arrived, AE automatically replaced it, and the card number changed.
Today, while checking AMEX Offers in the app, I suddenly found that the Marriott $500-$100 offer could be added both to my personal AMEX Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant and to my newly opened Business Gold card. See below:
Further Testing
As we all know, AMEX usually allows each AMEX Offer under the same SSN to be added to only one credit card (the offer terms also say this). I added other offers to the Business Gold card and compared them with my personal cards, testing all the offers on my cards that could be double-enrolled between biz and personal cards, including but not limited to:
- Marriott International Luxury Brands $500-$100
- Waldorf Astoria + Conrad -Select Hotels $350-$70 (this also works in quite a few places in mainland China)
- Levi's $125-$25
- Saatva.com - Luxury Mattresses $500-$100
- Tripfuel.com $200-$50, up to 3 times
- Ticket Galaxy $300-$65
- California Pizza Kitchen $40-$10
- Offers for extra MR points also worked
- etc
What these double-enrollable offers had in common was this: before I applied for the Biz Gold, none of them had been added to a personal credit card, and they had to be added to the business card first, then to the personal card.
The offers that could not be double-enrolled were all offers that had already been added to my personal cards before I opened the Biz Gold. Trying to add them again to the Biz Gold card would always produce an error.
The same applies on desktop and mobile: if you add it to a personal card first, the business card cannot add it afterward either:
On the other hand, as long as you add it to the business card first, the personal card can be added afterward as well (though only to one personal card):
At the moment, it is still unclear whether my case is unique. We asked some friends to test it, and theirs did not seem to support double enrollment (all were older biz cards). My guess is that recently opened biz cards, or possibly recently replaced biz cards, may have this behavior. Readers with newly opened biz cards are welcome to share more DPs. [Note: make sure the offer is visible on both your current biz card and personal card, whether in the app or on the website. Enroll the biz card first, then enroll the personal card. Older biz cards do not seem to work.]