The American Express Cobalt Card is the most innovative card product in Canada and it’s a card that I recommend that everyone gets, especially considering you can get $50 cash back when you get approved.
One of the best features of the card is the 5x points category bonus for spend at grocery stores, restaurants, bars, and food delivery services like Uber Eats or Waiters en Route. While not as exciting, there’s also a 2x category bonus for travel, including transit.
Sweet Spot
The best redemption you can make with the Membership Rewards Select (MRS) points you earn is transferring to SPG points as transfers to Airline Partners is not allowed with MRS. As with regular Membership Rewards, you can transfer 2 MRS to 1 SPG point.
If you consider that $1 spent at a grocery store, restaurant, bar or with a food delivery service nets you 5 MRS and that 5 MRS = 2.5 SPG points, you quickly realize that you earn 2.5 SPG points for every dollar you spend on food and drink!
That’s incredible because SPG points are far and away the most powerful points currency in the market. While I have reservations about assigning values to points, you can refer to The Points Guy’s most recent valuation of SPG points and see that he values them at 2.7¢ USD per point, which is the highest amongst all programs.
I haven’t delved very deeply into the power of the SPG program in a stand alone post but I do cover the program in quite a bit of depth in my reviews of the SPG Personal Card and the SPG Business Card.
What’s Annoying
I assume most of you will be in a similar situation where you have both regular Membership Rewards (MR) and Membership Reward Select (MRS) if you have an MR accumulating card like the Gold Personal, Gold Business, Platinum Personal or Platinum Business alongside your Cobalt card.
Over the years, I have transferred my MR points to SPG and recently have done so quite often in order to take advantage of Marriott’s incredible Travel Packages. As such, I already have my SPG number associated with my MR account.
When I went to add my SPG account to my MRS account, I got the following error:
I had initially thought that perhaps I had entered the wrong information but I double and triple checked my information and it was correct.
My initial hypothesis was that they could not associate my SPG number with my MRS account because it was already associated with my MR account so I called into AMEX for the easy fix … or at least I thought it would be easy.
When I reached the customer service rep, she informed me that my hypothesis was correct and that there was no way to transfer my MRS over to my SPG account unless I deleted my SPG number from my MR profile … seriously?
The rep was kind enough to offer to do exactly that but then reinstate my SPG with my MR account once the transfer was completed. While that is nice of her to do, it still doesn’t change the fact that this is something that will have to be done every single time I want to do a transfer to SPG … or at least until they come up with a fix.
Possible Solution
Until AMEX fixes this issue, you can try to take matters into your own hands and create a secondary SPG account because you can combine SPG accounts as long as they are in the same name, have the same address and all the same pertinent details like date of birth, etc.
When you are ready to combine accounts, you can do so by filling out the form pictured below:
The only problem with this strategy is that you can only combine the accounts once before one of the accounts is deleted, meaning that once you do so, you will have to go through the whole cycle of creating an account and linking it to AMEX all over again.
I may employ this strategy in order to “hold” the SPGs transferred from MRS but I would much rather AMEX fix their IT issue.
Conclusion
While this is certainly not optimal, I’m assuming that AMEX’s IT department will have to find a fix for this as there are probably going to be a lot of people that find themselves in the same situation.