Not totally dead: Some Amex Offers still loadable to multiple cards

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. – Mark Twain (well, actually, it’s a misquote…but still…)

It has been widely reported today that the various methods of adding Amex Offers to multiple cards are dead. That’s somewhat true. It turns out that some are still working when synced to multiple cards. This story is developing — it looks like we will need to collect more datapoints to fully understand. However, this much is obvious: one foot is firmly in the grave for Amex Offers.

Cue the funeral march

For years, it has been possible to add a single Amex Offer to multiple cards by logging in and then opening each of your cards in different tabs in the same browser (known as the “multi-tab trick”). At some point, some offers stopped showing up after being added — but you could almost always log in via the old interface and still see all of the offers you had added (though some unsynced offers shown in the new interface wouldn’t be available to sync in the old interface…they would only show up after they were synced). Then, Amex started slow-rolling some offers — making them available on some cards on Day 1, others on Day 5, etc. This caused some to suggest multiple logins for different cards.

Over the past month, the multiple login trick appears to have died, with an offer disappearing from other logins tied to the same SSN once added to a card in any login under that SSN. Today, it has been widely reported that the multi-tab trick died as well. In short, you can still use the trick to add an offer to several cards in the same login. However, once you refresh / log out and back in, the offer will have only successfully synced to the first card you chose to sync.

But there appear to be some exceptions

Through trial and error, we’ve found that there appear to be some offers still syncable with the multi-tab trick.

First key point: offers you synced before today are all remaining so far. My guess is that those offers you synced to multiple cards before August 1st will continue to work on multiple cards.

Seond key point: Doctor of Credit reports that you can add one Membership Rewards version and one statement credit version of the same offer. It appears these are treated as separate offers.

Third key point: some offers still sync to multiple cards, some don’t. It was theorized at first that only new offers were dead — that is to say that old offers could still be synced to multiple cards but new offers couldn’t. Of course, we have a much larger sample size of “old” offers that we know still work. However, through trial and error, we’ve determined that at least one old offer wouldn’t sync to multiple cards (the Crate & Barrel offer below). That indicates to me that this may not be so simple as being dead — perhaps there is something else at play in determining whether or not an offer will sync with multiple cards.

But that may be wishful thinking and the ability to sync to multiple cards might be sporadically working but on its way out the door either way. Shawn at Miles to Memories reported getting the new Staples offer to sync to two cards, but said he probably clicked three in under 1 second and by the third card, he started seeing the error that you have likely seen today at some point when trying the multi-tab trick in the old interface:

It is certainly possible that syncing to multiple cards will completely die any minute — so if you have old offers you would like to sync to multiple cards, try it now – it may not last much longer.

What still works? A handful of datapoints

Here are some data points for offers that worked using the multi-tab trick still this evening:

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