Can the most expensive travel-rewards card get even more expensive? Sure can! And American Express is testing the limits of what people will pay with their recent changes to the fee they’re charging for authorized users on the personal Platinum American Express card.

The good news is that if you’re a current cardholder and aren’t interested in having anyone else as an authorized user on your account, not much is changing for you.

If you just have a spouse or significant other as an authorized user, the fee will be going up for that one authorized user, but not by a lot.

But if you have more than one authorized user on your account or are contemplating that, read on. This will hit families with teenagers especially hard. (Ask me how I know!) And if you’ve had other family or friends get authorized-user cards on your account so they could get lounge access, you may want to rethink that.

There’s also a small change to the digital-entertainment credit, so if you’re only interested in that, skip to that heading.

Authorized-user fees

The annual fee for the primary cardholder is already a high $695, and up until recently, if the primary cardholder wanted to add up to three authorized users who would get their own cards (which would get them Centurion Lounge and Delta SkyClub access and the same hotel status with Hilton and Marriott as the primary cardholder), that fee was $175 per year, total. So for three additional cards, you’d pay roughly $60 per year per person. Which isn’t cheap, but also isn’t terrible when you consider that bringing a non-authorized-user guest into a Centurion Lounge is $50 per adult guest or $30 per child. For a family that travels together three or four times per year, those guest fees could really add up, so the $175 could be worth it.

We got my husband a Platinum AmEx earlier this year and put our two kids and me on the account as authorized users so we’d all have lounge access. We’ve really been enjoying the Centurion Lounge at Sea-Tac. (We also wanted to get started building the kids’ credit history, and since AmEx allows authorized users age 13+, we were able to kill two birds with one card application.)

But this week, AmEx announced that the fee for authorized users is going up, up, up. Instead of a flat $175 for up to three people, it’ll now be $195 per person. Which adds up to a gulp-inducing $585. On top of the $695 annual fee for the card itself. $1,280 total, if you’re doing the math along with me.

This change went into effect this week, so if you already have a Platinum card, it’ll only kick in for you once your next cardholder year starts.

Will we keep the Platinum when our next annual fee becomes due? I highly doubt it. As much as we enjoy the Centurion Lounge access, we do have Priority Pass lounge access with a different card. (And that card doesn’t charge any fee at all for authorized users and allows you to bring two guests in with you for free!) The Priority Pass lounges can vary a lot in quality, so I definitely prefer Centurion lounges over pretty much any Priority Pass lounge, but do I prefer Centurion $1,280 worth? Nope.

So what’s our plan? We’ll likely call AmEx and ask if there are any retention offers available to make keeping the card worth it. AmEx is also known to have retention offers for authorized users, so we can ask specifically about those, as well. If there isn’t anything they can offer to make it make sense to keep the card in general or the authorized-user cards specifically, we’ll then ask to downgrade the primary card to an AmEx that has no annual fee and see if we can get the kids’ authorized-user accounts to stay open and associated with that card so we don’t negatively impact their credit history.

I’m guessing that AmEx is increasing the authorized-user fees to help reduce lounge crowding, which has been a notable issue in the past few years. (And just profit generally, of course.) This may do that.

Digital-entertainment credit

One of the benefits of the Platinum card is a $20/month digital-entertainment credit, up to $240 per year. Until this week, Audible was one of the digital-entertainment expenses that could trigger that credit. But AmEx has removed Audible from its list and replaced it with the Wall Street Journal. So if you had your Audible account set up to be paid with your Platinum card, you should see if you can replace that with one of the other companies that do still trigger the credit (Disney+, ESPN+, Hulu, New York Times, Peacock, and Sirius XM).

Something to keep an eye out for?

The Canadian AmEx annual fee is increasing next month from $699 to $799, so I’ve seen some rumblings where people are wondering if that means the US version of the card could possibly going through a price hike soon, too. But I’m not sure about that. The Canadian card, even at $799 Canadian, is still only about $590 US. The Canadian annual-fee adjustment may just be AmEx catching Canadian cardholders up closer to our already-high fee. But anything is possible! If this authorized-user-fee increase doesn’t reduce crowding in Centurion and Delta lounges, we may well see another general annual fee increase.