Follow these steps to get funds to spend on United flights and you can see St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC… just know you’ll have to fly to Newark! Photo by: Evan Berman

Happy New Year, everyone! One of the things that you may not realize about it being 2023 is any calendar year credit card perk has refreshed. One example is the AmEx Platinum Airline Credit. I review the details on what this credit covers and the options in that article. Now, I’d like to show you how to purchase the United TravelBank Funds, the option that I use for the $200 in AmEx Credit.

What is TravelBank?

TravelBank is an option that airlines such as JetBlue and United use where you can purchase travel credits to be used on a future flight with the airline. In this case, these funds may only be used to purchase flights on United, not a partner airline or codeshare. Why would you want to use this? Well, by using the $200 airline credit from the AmEx Platinum card this way, you get $200 in airfare, not extras that you may or may not pay for normally. In short, the $200 credit becomes $200 of cash, not a nice add-on.

Important note: before you do any of this, you will need to select United as your prefered airline in the AmEx app. This can be done by logging into your AmEx account, selecting the Platinum card if you have multiple, and going to the Rewards & Benefits Category.

If you cannot remember when you last received credit from AmEx, there is a tracker that you can use (screenshot below).

Note: I recommend using the credits on January 1 every year so you never have to worry about anything changing or keeping track of your usage. Also, if you’re sneaky, you can double- or triple-dip AmEx Credits. I’ll get to that in a later article. 😉

How to Purchase TravelBank Funds:

Follow this link to visit the United TravelBank site. Login to your account (same information as the normal United site) and then select the denomination that you prefer to purchase. I recommend that you purchase $100 of TravelBank funds twice so that the out-of-pocket cost is $0, but you may choose any of the denominations shown in the screenshot below.

If you do not have a saved card, input your AmEx Platinum information. You want to make sure that you will trigger the credits, so do not skip this step!

After the purchase goes through, the amount of TravelBank funds is immediately updated. As I mentioned previously, the AmEx credits will take a few days to update. An added bonus is that this purchase is coded as Air Travel, so you will earn 5x on this purchase. 1,000 MR points in addition to $200 in future travel on United is a good deal to take advantage of!

Summary:

I’ve explained before how to maximize the AmEx Platinum $200 Credit. This article gives you a step-by-step guide to the process of buying United TravelBank funds. As always, reach out with any questions about this topic or any others!

Evan