The Platinum Card is often discussed from the cardholder’s perspective. This article looks at the incentives of the merchants on the other side.
Whenever Amex announces another Platinum refresh, the conversation usually focuses on the same question: can cardholders extract enough value from the credits to justify the annual fee?
But there is another question that receives less attention: why do merchants keep agreeing to participate? Why did Saks want to participate at all? Why Lululemon? Why Resy, Equinox, Hilton, Dell and dozens of others?
The more you look into the structure, the less it resembles a traditional rewards program. Instead, it starts to look like an Amex-directed marketplace.
Cardholders receive benefits. Merchants gain access to a large group of affluent consumers. American Express sits in the middle, connecting the two. The cardholder is clearly only one part of the story.
Stakeholder | What they are really buying |
|---|---|
Cardholder | perks, statement credits, premium experiences |
Merchant | affluent consumer acquisition + measurable incremental spend |
Amex | retention, engagement, partner funding, closed-loop data, platform strength |
If Amex simply wanted to give cardholders spending power, there are easier ways to do it. The Chase Sapphire Reserve’s travel credit is a good example. Most cardholders barely notice it. Buy a flight, book a hotel, take an Uber, and the credit largely takes care of itself.
Many Platinum benefits work differently.
The Lululemon credit requires you to think about Lululemon. The Saks credit required you to think about Saks. Dining credits are often tied to specific restaurants or platforms. Hotel credits require particular booking channels.
From a cardholder’s perspective, that can feel unnecessarily complicated. From a merchant’s perspective, it makes perfect sense. A broad travel credit creates spending. A merchant-specific credit creates spending at a particular merchant. That is a very different objective.
When you look at the benefits through that lens, many of the design choices look quite intentional.
Amex Is Not Paying the Full Headline Cost
When Amex advertises thousands of dollars of annual Platinum value, the obvious assumption is that Amex is paying for all of it. Public disclosures would strongly suggest otherwise. During the September 2025 Platinum refresh that raised the annual fee to $895, the Wall Street Journal reported:
“Amex said the companies it partners with across all its cards shoulder more than a quarter of the cost of rewards.”
That is one of the more revealing datapoints publicly available on premium-card economics. It does not tell us the funding split for Saks, Lululemon, Delta, Hilton, Resy or any other specific relationship. But it tells us something important: partner funding is not incidental to the model.
Amex’s own investor language points in the same direction. Company filings repeatedly reference the ability to identify and negotiate “partner-funded value for Card Members.”
Then came another useful disclosure. On the Q3 2025 earnings call, Amex said:
“Over the last 12 months, our partners have offered over $3 billion of value across embedded benefits, Amex Travel, and Amex Offers.”
That phrasing is important. Not “Amex provided.” Partners offered. The coupon book starts looking less like just a stack of issuer-funded perks and more like a mechanism for connecting merchants with Amex’s customer base.
Amex More or Less Explained the Model
The strongest confirmation of this broader logic came from CEO Steve Squeri during the same earnings call.
Discussing Platinum refreshes, he said:
“Ultimately, product refreshes fuel a virtuous cycle of growth for the company. By continually enhancing our offerings, we drive the engagement and scale of our premium customer base. Our high-spending card members attract a growing number of world-class merchant partners who add more value to membership, which drives more engagement. This enables us to generate more dollars that we can reinvest in enhancing our products.”
Amex believes richer benefits help attract and retain affluent cardholders. Those cardholders are valuable to merchants, which makes merchant participation easier to secure. Merchant participation then helps support additional benefits.
The important point is that these merchant relationships are no longer a side effect of the Platinum Card. They have become part of the product itself.
Amex Offers Provides the Clearest Public Blueprint
The clearest public window into the model is probably not the Platinum Card itself. It is Amex Offers.
Amex’s merchant-facing materials describe Offers as a targeted, measurable marketing platform. The merchant receives reporting on redemption behavior, average transaction size, customer characteristics, and campaign ROI.
This is not traditional couponing. It is card-linked performance marketing. Amex even publishes case studies showing strong ROI metrics along with new customer acquisition and spending lift.
Embedded Platinum benefits are not identical products, but the underlying commercial logic appears related.
Amex controls access to a large base of affluent, high-spending customers. Merchants want access to that base. Amex can steer spending behavior. Amex can measure results. That measurement matters because Amex operates a much more closed-loop model than traditional network structures.
The analogy to Amex Offers may be even more pointed given that the Saks credit is expected to be replaced by “new and exclusive Amex Offers for Platinum Card Members at top retailers and brands” from July 1, 2026, according to NerdWallet. At the time of writing, however, American Express has not released further details.
Why the Saks Credit Likely Made Economic Sense
Merchants may see a Platinum credit less as a discount and more as customer acquisition.
Take the old Saks credit as a simple framework example.
The consumer framing is familiar: Platinum cardholder receives a $50 Saks benefit.
But from the merchant side, the relevant question is not “Did we give away $50?” It is “What customer behavior did the campaign create?”
Very few people spend exactly $50. They spend $82. Or $117. Or $164. The credit changes the purchase decision.
A customer who was not planning to visit Saks suddenly opens the app because part of the purchase is effectively prepaid.
Illustrative Model
Assumption | Base Case |
|---|---|
Eligible accounts | 1,000,000 |
Utilization | 50% |
Redeemers | 500,000 |
Average purchase | $110 |
Gross merchandise margin | 55% |
Gross profit per order | ~$61 |
This is not a Saks forecast. It is a constructed thought experiment:
The model changes if the merchant is not thinking simply of subsidizing a purchase but is instead acquiring a customer. A retailer that helps fund a one-time purchase may lose money on that transaction. A retailer that acquires a customer who returns several times over the following years may not.
Merchant economics improve further if the campaign generates repeat purchases, app adoption, email capture, new-to-brand customers, or durable customer lifetime value.
At that point, the benefit begins to resemble a customer-acquisition program aimed at affluent consumers rather than a simple retail discount.
That distinction matters because Platinum cardholders are not generic retail traffic. Amex repeatedly emphasizes how unusually valuable this segment is: its Consumer and Business Platinum franchises represented roughly $530 billion of annual spend globally, with cardholders spending approximately three times more annually than average card spend on other networks.
Looking back, it may have helped at the margins, even if it wasn’t enough to change Saks’ broader trajectory.
The Lululemon Credit Shows Why Structure Matters
Quarterly credits create repeated opportunities to bring customers back into a merchant’s stores, app, or website.
The Lululemon benefit arguably illustrates the model even more clearly. Unlike Saks, Lululemon is a premium lifestyle company with strong demographic overlap with the Platinum customer base.
For Amex, Lululemon reinforces the card’s lifestyle positioning. For Lululemon, the benefit creates repeated shopping prompts aimed at affluent consumers.
Viewed from the merchant’s perspective, the quarterly structure is arguably the most interesting part of the benefit. A single annual credit creates one interaction. Four quarterly credits create four separate opportunities to get a customer browsing products, opening an app, visiting a store, or making a purchase.
That does not guarantee additional spending. It does, however, create multiple chances for spending to occur.
The cardholder experiences the benefit as fragmented. The merchant experiences it as repeated engagement. Those are two very different perspectives on the same set-up.
This logic applies throughout much of the Platinum coupon book. What often looks inconvenient from the consumer side frequently looks economically attractive from the merchant side.
The Cost of a Credit Is Not Its Face Value
Discussions of the Platinum coupon book often focus on maximum theoretical value. But maximum theoretical value and realized issuer cost are very different numbers.
Benefit Structure | Likely Utilization Pattern |
|---|---|
Broad automatic travel credit | high |
Flexible category credit | moderate to high |
Quarterly merchant-specific credit | lower |
Enrollment-heavy niche benefit | potentially lower still |
A benefit’s face value and its expected economic cost are not the same number.
Resy Is the Most Interesting Credit in the Coupon Book
Resy deserves separate treatment because it is different from the other partners.
Unlike Saks or Lululemon, Resy is not just a merchant partner. It is a platform owned by American Express.
Unlike Saks or Lululemon, Resy is not simply a merchant partner. It is a platform owned by American Express. Amex acquired Resy in 2019. Since then, Platinum cardholders have increasingly encountered it through dining credits, restaurant access and other dining-related benefits.
So while most Platinum benefits require Amex to partner with an outside company, Resy is different.
When a Platinum cardholder uses a Resy dining credit, Amex is not only supporting participating restaurants. It is also driving activity on a platform it owns, manages and monetizes itself.
That creates a different strategic dynamic from most of the coupon book. The benefit is not simply steering spending toward a partner merchant. It is also helping strengthen an asset already inside the Amex family.
What We Know, What We Infer, What Remains Unknown
What We Know
• Amex says partners shoulder more than a quarter of rewards costs across its cards.
• Amex repeatedly references partner-funded value in investor language.
• The company disclosed more than $3 billion of partner-provided value.
• Amex Offers publicly operates as a targeted, measurable merchant-marketing platform.
What We Can Infer
• Embedded Platinum credits likely share at least some commercial logic with Amex Offers.
• Merchant-specific benefit design likely influences realized cost.
• Overspend, repeated engagement and partial utilization improve economics.
• Merchants participate because Platinum cardholders are unusually attractive customers.
What We Do Not Know
• Individual merchant contract terms
• Funding percentages by partner
• Exact breakage rates
• Average overspend behavior by benefit
The Better Way to Think About the Coupon Book
The coupon book looks less like a rewards program and more like a collection of sponsored customer-acquisition campaigns.
That helps explain why such different companies have appeared in the coupon book. Saks sells luxury retail. Hilton sells hotel rooms. Equinox sells fitness memberships. Dell sells computers. Resy sells restaurant reservations. What those businesses have in common is not what they sell. It is who they are trying to reach.
With that perspective the potpourri of coupon book partners is anything but random.
It is not simply a collection of lifestyle perks attached to a premium card. It is a marketplace in which merchants get access to, and help fund ongoing access to, affluent consumers, cardholders receive benefits for participating, and Amex sits in the middle coordinating the relationship.
The coupon book looks oddly constructed if you think Amex is merely distributing rewards. It looks much more rational if you think Amex is operating a marketplace where Amex provides access, and merchants help fund that ongoing access to affluent customers.
Whether the Platinum Card is worth its annual fee remains a personal calculation. But viewing the card through the merchant lens helps explain why the credits keep multiplying. They are not simply benefits for cardholders. They are also marketing channels, customer-acquisition tools and engagement platforms for the businesses on the other side of the transaction. With the Saks credit coming to an end, it will be interesting to see what the next chapter brings.