Credit Card Coupon Books Are Tiresome — Except When These Provide Real Value

I’ve been thinking about the refreshes of the American Express Platinum Card® (see rates and fees) and Chase Sapphire Reserve® (See rates and fees), and what they mean for coupon books. There’s been a huge industry trend towards higher annual fees ‘justified’ by credits and merchant-funded offers.

You pay more up front, and get discounts and deals. Premium credit cards have turned into Groupon and The Entertainment Book. There’s a lot of fatigue over it. Making the math work on these cards has turned into work, which is decidedly not premium.

And yet people are generally happy with Amex Platinum now. They’ve leaned in further into statement credits as they’ve raised the fee. And here’s the difference: they’ve added so many rich credits.

• The total available credits are 3x – 4x the card’s annual fee.

• You’re not having to work to use all the credits to make the math work. So you don’t really feel you have to change your lifestyle for the card.

• Those credits are mostly easy to use. Perfect case is point is the Resy dining credit. There are thousands of restaurants where you can use your credit. The hotel credit works on one night stays (Fine Hotels & Resorts properties) and at $300 (once in each half of the year) is big enough to cover the cost of many one night stays.

I think my takeaway is that if the offers are rich enough, they don’t feel like fatigue, they feel like genuine value.

Here’s the other thing I notice about Amex Platinum. It’s a benefit card, and it’s not very good for actually spending. I don’t really spend money on it other than airfare (which earns 5x) and purchases that earn a statement credit.

The American Express bet is they put it in your wallet, get you using it for benefits, you carry the card and use it. It feels premium (mirror card!) and you’ll spend on it. They don’t actually have to offer competitive rewards-earning.

With a lot of people, that clearly works. However, I wonder how sustainable some of the credits are. American Express wants to goose the Resy platform, which is owns. But how long will those dollars be available on the Resy side? It’s Resy marketing subsidizing Platinum.

For many of the other credits, of course, it’s money to the cardmember – sure – but it’s really American Express selling access to their customers to brands. And that makes sense for a brand until it doesn’t. Eventually a brand decides they’ve gotten as many customers as they’re going to get, and there’s little value in continuing to give those customers discounts and possibly paying American Express for the privilege. So there needs to be a constant pipeline of new offers coming to replace the old ones, so that cardmembers feel like nothing’s being taken away (and they don’t decide to cancel).

Here’s how things compare with Chase Sapphire Reserve®. Chase raised the annual fee but didn’t layer on credits at the same multiple. The credits are worth more than the annual fee, but it feels like you need to do work to get the math to align. Against the $795 annual fee, there’s:

• $300 travel credit
  
• $300 in dining credits ($150 Jan-June, $150 July-Dec) – the problem is there aren’t very many restaurants.
  
• $500 in annual hotel credits through The Edit (Two $250 credits for prepaid, 2+ night stays at select luxury properties)
  
• $300 in credits on StubHub and viagogo ($150 Jan-June, $150 July-Dec)

Things like $300 total in annual DoorDash credits don’t really count. It’s broken up as $5/$10/$10 with most of the money in grocery delivery and that doesn’t make delivery on its own work out (if you’re ordering food delivery anyway, then ‘doubledash’ to get the $10 to count against an item you have delivered instead of being eaten up in the fee).

Similarly the $10 a month Lyft credit doesn’t really ‘count’ in the math. It’s a rideshare coupon designed to get you to use Lyft instead of Uber. But like the $5 monthly DoorDash food delivery discount, it’s either too de minimis or needs too much shift in behavior to be a value-driver.

For Reserve, the travel credits and Edit credits cover the cost of the card. And then,

• You get Chase airport lounge access, and many of the lounges are very nice
  
• It’s actually a strong card for spending with 4x on direct airline and hotel spend and 3x on dining, plus extra benefits for spending $75,000 in a year on the card.

But many people won’t value StubHub, and the dining credits aren’t useful to many because the available options are too limited. So you really do need to get use out of The Edit to ‘cover the cost’ of the card. There’s a two-night minimum stay. This is easy for someone like me, but for the very occasional traveler less so. A $250 discount is nice but not everyone stays at luxury properties, either, and the two-night minimum means the credit covers less of the total cost than it would (which is the idea, Chase gets some of that credit covered by the commission they earn).

And that set of $75,000 spend tier benefits? I love that there’s Southwest credits and status, since about 41% of the seats out of my home airport are on Southwest. But Southwest (and IHG which offers Diamond status) isn’t very premium, and The Shops at Chase credit is only for the limited products offered at limited brands and pricing not be as good as you’d find elsewhere.

This card absolutely works for me, but for many it’s work and that’s the problem. I want it for the 4x earn categories, I ‘cover the cost’ with The Edit and with the travel credit. And what I realized this weekend was how nice the dining credit then feels when you use it. The card already feels ‘free’ in some sense, so the restaurant credit feels like a free meal. There are a couple of restaurants in Austin that I enjoy anyway and it’s nice to have that $150.

If there aren’t restaurants where you live, you can spend it when you travel, and make it part of that celebration. But if you’re not already ‘covering the cost’ of the card and feel like you have to use it, you’re going out of your way and changing your behavior chasing the value of a card. That’s not premium or luxury.

One bit of good news, of course, is that Chase added a $250 hotel credit for 2026 at specific brands (prepaid Chase Travel hotel bookings for stays with IHG, Montage, Pendry, Omni, Virgin, Minor and Pan Pacific hotels with minimum 2-night stay). That’s not hard to use, makes it easier to cover the cost of the card, and then it feels like so much less work.

And the Sapphire Reserve is actually a card for spending, plus those lounges like the ones in Philadelphia and at New York LaGaurdia are really great.

Philadelphia Sapphire Lounge

New York LaGuardia Sapphire Lounge

Even small Las Vegas – I was genuinely shocked by the quality champagne on offer (Gosset Grande Réserve Brut).

In general, readers love the Amex Platinum refresh. They’re bribing you with about three grand. While I like the Sapphire Reserve refresh because it helps me earn valuable points fast. I have both of them! But I use them very differently. I ‘cover my cost’ with each, and then have access to both sets of lounges.

Meanwhile, I have used Capital One’s Venture X for spending that doesn’t earn bonuses on other cards, cover that card’s fee with its $300 portal travel credit (buy an airline ticket) plus the 10,000 annual points at card renewal. And I get access to their lounges – I really like Capital One Landing at Washington National and I’m looking forward to this restaurant concept extending to LaGuardia soon. Less coupon-booky!

However I expect that the new Bilt Palladium Card is going to displace much of my Venture spend because it earns points faster for spending that doesn’t earn a bonus elsewhere, and the points themselves are more valuable (better transfer partners, 1.25x on portal) plus comes with Bilt Gold which unlocks bigger transfer bonuses, free drinks at Blade lounges in New York, and their answer to Amex Fine Hotels & Resorts.

My big takeaway is that,

• Coupon book fatigue is real, but doesn’t matter if the coupon book value is rich enough. It’s when the offers are small, you have to work to use them, or you need to use most of them to justify a card’s fee that it feels like work, like you’re changing your lifestyle for a credit card rather than the card empowering your lifestyle.

• Spend value matters. Benefits are one feature of a card, and a reason to have a card, but not a reason to put spending on the card. Amex Platinum is great to have, not to spend money on (outside of airfare). Sapphire Reserve is great for spending if you can justify its cost. Bilt Palladium is going to get most of my spending that doesn’t earn bigger bonuses elsewhere.

• Specific lounge locations and benefits that align with your lifestyle matter. These hotel credits are right up my alley and not tough to use for me. Chase’s dining credit works for me too, but won’t work for many people in smaller cities. The Equinox credit with Amex just isn’t going to drive my behavior. Specific partners matter. So do lounge locations. If one network has a lounge in your home city, that makes a big difference for your actual use. My number one destination is Washington National airport, so I’m a regular at the Capital One Landing there (which is much better than the Centurion lounge).

I generate a lot of spending. I travel a lot. I want access to all of the lounge networks, to experience them and understand them and report on them. So all of these cards are in my wheelhouse. If only one is going to work best for you that will be the one whose lounges you’ll use most, whose partners align best with your life, and where you can… actually get good value from spending on the card.

For rates and fees of the American Express Platinum Card®, click here.