American Express- Nectar Card (American Express)

Member Name: olly374

Product:	American Express
Date:	14/12/05 (1205 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Part of the Nectar Scheme

Disadvantages: Not accepted in many places, customer service operators who sound helpful but do little

I got an American Express card because it was part of the Nectar Scheme. This card was to replace my Barclaycard when BarclayCard announced that their credit card would no longer be part of the scheme from September 2005.

I applied for the card online and the form took about 15 minutes to complete. This was due to every page being checked when you pressed send and time taking for the processing of the page.

3 weeks after I applied for the card it arrived by courier with it's purple design and nectar logo on it.

I then waited patiently for my pin number to come. No pin number came. So I telephoned the Customer Service team to inform them in case someone had stolen it in the post. I was past through 3 people. It seemed that the first two operators where confused that I had an American Express Nectar Card as they hadn't seemed to have heard of it.

So the first operator passed me to a second operator who then passed me to the an American Express Nectar Card
Applications operator who passed me back to the second operator. What was particularly strange was that I was being passed from an two Indian operators back to a British operator back to an Indian operator. Eventually I was told that my pin number would be sent out in 7 days. I phoned them up 7 days later because I had not recieved a pin number and was told the same thing. 2.5 weeks later I moved house and had to phone them up to give them my change of address and inform them that I still hadn't got a pin number. The pin number then arrived 3 days later.

I generally use this card and pay off the bill. However one of the problems I am discovering is that it is not so widely accepted as Visa or Mastercard and therefore am limited to the places I can use it both online and offline.

The card gives you 2,000 Nectar points as an introductory offer and gives you an APR on balance transfers of 5.9% for the life of the balance as long as the balance transfer is done in the first 5 months of having the card.

Apart from being able to collect points from a well known UK scheme I don't see any advantages of having this card over other cards.

Advantages-
-collect Nectar points

Disadvantages-
-not accepted in as many places as a Visa or Mastercard
-operators sound helpful but do very little

Summary: Nectar point collecting credit card