Last week, Miles Earn and Burn posted about a recent delay in the posting of coupon credits from various American Express card benefits. We’ve also received a couple of anecdotal reports of delays in the posting of welcome bonuses. We see this happen almost every year (sometimes a couple of times per year). The moral of the story is always to relax: your stuff will post.
A few years ago, I wrote a post titled Relax: Your elite stuff will post. That one was in response to many comments and messages we had received upon the dawn of a new year about the delay in posting expected elite night credits, rollover miles, etc. We often see the same thing regarding Amex coupon credits, airline incidental fee credits, welcome bonuses, etc.
Many Amex benefits tend to post like clockwork…..until they don’t. That is to say that you’ll often see a qualifying charge receive its corresponding credit (assuming you’ve enrolled where enrollment is required and made a qualifying charge) within a few days. It may have reliably been 3-5 days after the charge for months or even years. We inevitably see a period where some stuff just starts posting slowly and some folks panic about why they haven’t received a credit on day 4/5/6/etc and some will start chatting with support or declaring that this has died or that no longer works, etc (sometimes after being given inaccurate information from a chat representative). Almost without fail, the solution is to just wait a week or two or even three — we sometimes just see a delay in credits and bonuses posting. It is very unlikely that there has been any change in the way things work but rather we sometimes see a bottleneck.
Unfortunately, chat representatives may dole out incorrect information, either because they are answering based on what they think is true or based on what someone else thought was true and passed on to them as though it is infallibly true. Remember that the average chat representative has probably never had the exact card that you’re calling about and probably hasn’t made the type of purchase you’re making and therefore isn’t speaking from experience but rather a script. They may legitimately (but mistakenly) think that your qualifying purchase doesn’t qualify.
I’d always give it a minimum of 2-3 weeks (and more likely a month or more) before I worry about a benefit or welcome bonus that hasn’t posted on the timeline I expected. These things almost always work themselves out within that window. If a month goes by without receiving a credit of some sort that you expected, then it might be time to either reach out to the issuer or ask around in Facebook groups, etc. Before that, it’s probably just a temporary slowdown that will resolve itself.
For what it’s worth, my own wireless services credits haven’t posted for this month, but my $20 flexible business credits have. Your mileage may vary, but your patience should remain constant.
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