Well, hello there Mr Benjamin!
American Express has been running some great referral offers this past year, with the signup bonuses often being better when signing up using someone’s referral link than when going directly to Amex.
Amex is now enhancing things on the referrer side too. If you have a Delta card, they’ve added a $100 incentive on top of the bonus SkyMiles that you earn as standard.
The Deal
- Refer friends & family from Amex Delta credit cards and get a $100 statement credit when making a Delta purchase in the 3 months after your first friend is approved on top of the bonus SkyMiles you’ll earn.
Key Terms
- Refer friends to apply by August 25, 2021.
Quick Thoughts
This isn’t the first time Amex has offered the opportunity to earn two different types of referral bonuses at the same time. For example, just recently you could refer someone to a new Amex card and get 4x/4% back at home furnishing stores on up to $25,000 of spend on top of the bonus points you’d earn as standard.
This is the first time I remember seeing them offer a $100 statement credit to the referrer on Delta cards though. The key thing to be aware of is that there’s an additional requirement in order to earn the $100 statement credit – you have to make a Delta purchase in the 3 months after your friend is approved.
When this kind of statement credit deal has been offered for people applying for the card themselves, the statement credit has been awarded for something as cheap as the $5.60 taxes and fees on an award flight – you’ve never had to actually spend $100 with Delta.
I’ve also been able to trigger one of those statement credits in the past by buying a $50 Delta gift card from this page. Note that Delta has three different gift card landing pages – the one I’ve linked to there and two run by CashStar. The CashStar pages won’t work as they’re a third party and so those purchases don’t show up as a Delta purchase. I can’t guarantee that buying a Delta gift card directly from them will still trigger statement credits; if you do decide to go that route, buy the gift card on desktop rather than mobile because mobile purchases seem to code different and could affect whether or not Amex sees it as a Delta purchase.
Something else worth noting is that Amex specifically states that you’ll get the $100 statement credit “after your first friend is approved”. That certainly makes it sound like you’ll only get one opportunity to earn a $100 statement credit, even if you refer two or more people to a new Delta card. That’s a shame, but an extra $100 is better than nothing.
These increased bonuses for the referrer only seem to be available on personal Delta cards right now; if you try referring from a Delta business card of some variety, the extra $100 isn’t listed.
It’ll be interesting to see if Amex decides to offer something similar on other cobranded cards like Hilton and Marriott.
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