Quick Tip: If You Cancel Amex Biz Platinum, You Lose Remaining Gogo Wifi Passes

Note: This post was published on July 26, 2019. Card details and benefits may have changed since then.

It’s not how I expected things to play out, which is why I wanted to share this.

The Business Platinum Card® from American Express and 10 Free Gogo Wifi Passes per year

The Business Platinum Card® from American Express charge card came with 10 free passes a year for a full Wifi flight pass on any airline that used Gogo when I wrote this in July 2019. That Gogo benefit has since ended.

I’ve written before about how I’d gotten used to this and, as American Airlines has moved more and more over to Viasat, I’ve had more flights where I couldn’t use my Gogo passes and had to pay anyway. To me, this definitely made my Business Platinum card just a bit less valuable, as each flight I got free Wifi on saved me at least $10 – sort of rebate on the annual fee.

With 10 passes deposited into my account in January and all of them unused, I decided to downgrade from my Business Platinum Card® from American Express to a standard $99 annual fee “Green Card.”  I decided to do that vs. closing it outright because Amex often sends out upgrade offers…. meaning I may be able to get some points to upgrade back to it, should I decide to in the future and if Amex decides to target me.

I assumed that since the Gogo passes were already in my account, they would remain there when I closed the card. I mean, why wouldn’t they? I’d paid the annual fee already (although I did also get the 10 Gogo passes last year, half of which expired unused) and usually when something is deposited into a third party account it is not withdrawn later for, really, any reason.

Apparently the IT link between Gogo and Amex is better than I gave credit for, because on my last flight (first one post-downgrade) I couldn’t find any certificates in my Gogo account. I asked the Live Chat (who I might add gave me a flight pass for my confusion) and they confirmed that if you close or downgrade the card, the passes are removed.

You learn something every day!

Did you know this? Any way around it?

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