Amex Offers - Free $50 on Airlines Spend $300 or more, get $50 back

American Express is one of our favorite credit card companies. In addition to having some great points-earning cards, such as the co-branded Starwood credit card, they have wonderful and frequent offers (such as Small Business Saturday) that can save you significant money that more than compensates for the $95 annual fee.

Earlier today, my father was on his Amex online account, looking at the various Amex Offers his cards were available for.

As it turned out, there were a few that were of interest to our family, including one that was on both my father and mother's Starwood Amex accounts.

Save On Your Air Travel Purchase - Spend $300 or more, get $50 back
Details. Get a one-time $50 statement credit by using your enrolled Card to spend a total of $300 or more on purchases made directly with any airline by 9/15/15. See terms and conditions for details and exclusions. 

But before we clicked to add the great offer, we first opened up different web browsers for each of our Amex cards that had this offer. This way, we could sign up for the offer on each of the cards. Otherwise, it will only go to the first card you sign up.

Immediately, we received the confirmation email from Amex Offers. However, given we just booked a flight for Phoenix in October, we weren't sure if we'd have another flight to purchase before 9/15/15.

But of course, my father had another trick up his sleeve.

So instead of buying a flight before we were ready, we locked in the $50 savings by going onto United Airlines Gift Registry and contributing $300 to my father's Registry.

That meant our Amex card would be immediately charged the $300 required to trigger the $50 statement credit without having to book a non-refundable flight right now. The $300 of Gift Registry balance is basically credit towards for future United flights - which in my family are as good as cash. Soon thereafter, my father received the Congrats email.

Since we have the same offer on 2 of my parents' other American Express cards, we can save another $100 for making another $600 of Gift Registry contributions. But we'll wait a few days until after the first $50 statement credit safely hits my father's Starwood Amex account.

UPDATE 7/16/15 - The statement credit just posted on my father's American Express account.

Warning - Clearly, I would not encourage anyone to speculatively spend $900 to save $150. My parents are willing to take the risk, because we know we have a flight to Israel each year. Let's just say those tickets cost more than $300/person.

Besides, we actually were planning on visiting our friends in Chicago later this summer. The timing works out well.