American Express Extended Warranty Experience

Hello:

I though i'd share my experience with the AMEX Extended Warranty service, I didn't see a General Topics area, so i'm posting it here since my machine was a Thinkpad.

I bought my machine in spring of 2010, a T410i to replace a really old but reliable T23. The only upgrades i got from Lenovo on the T410I was to the high res screen and a 128GB SSD, i added a 2GB memory stick on my own, and it came with the standard 1 year depot warranty.

It was fine for a year, but right after i noticed that the power adapter receptacle on the unit was loose, but it still worked so i just chose to live with it. A couple of months later a green line appeared in the middle of the screen, I tried to live with this, but after another month I decided i need to get this taken care of.

I remembered i purchased the notebook with an AMEX Blue card, that extended the original warranty up to 1 year, so i called up the warranty people to see what they could do for me. After telling them the problem i was experiencing, they wanted me to mail or fax them the receipt, Amex statement with the purchase, and the warranty statement from the manufacturer so that they could make a determination whether I was covered under their plan. I got the docs together in 2 days and mailed it in. I got a phone call from them about 5 days after i sent in the docs.

I was told that I would be covered and that i had two options, i could get my own repair quote or i could use their repair service. At the end, if they deemed it to costly to repair I would receive my Hard Drive back with the amount to replace the machine with a comparable model today. She mentioned it might be about 600 bucks for mine, which was not a quote, and since i only paid about 1K for it, it was fine with me, since i was very dissapointed with it after owning a T23 for so long which was such a great workhorse.

I opted for their repair service and I was told that the repair service would be contacting me. After 2 days i received an email from a company called PC Laptops, some small chain based out of Utah with instructions. I was to print and fill out a release form as well as a pre paid UPS label that was attached to the email. I was also instructed to take the notebook with the power adapter to a UPS store where they packaged and sent the notebook to PC Latops on their account.

It was moving pretty fast at this point, but this is where it slowed down. The shipping was 3 day service, and they did receive it in 3 days. I contacted PC Laptops with the phone number in the email to get some information. I was told by a friendly person about the process. They had received my notebook and they were going to diagnose the issues and order the parts, which would take up to a week. Then once they receive the parts, a day or two to repair the machine, then a day of burn-in before they'd ship it back to me.

I called a couple of times over the next 2 weeks and it seemed to be moving, parts were ordered, they were coming in, and it looked like i was going to get my repaired mahcine back soon. The I got a call from AMEX Warranty. AMEX decided the repairs were too costly so they were going to credit the original transaction amount back to my account.

I was a bit dissapointed since i was expecting my notebook back, but since they were giving me back the full transaction amount, i couldn't really complain. I saw the credit in my account 2 days later and after another day i had my micro ssd back, that i don't know what to do with.

I might buy a T420s, but i won't ever buy a cheaper thinkpad, the quality sucked. I'm considering buying a macbook air as well.

 

Glad to hear about your experience since I almost always use my Amex when purchasing computers.

 

well, since computers always depreciates, isn't it nice to have a full refund back?

 

Agree! AMEX is also really good about refunding pull purchase price for products like digital cameras, etc, if the repair is too expensive.

 

That's awesome about Amex pulling through, ironically I have used them to fix an Apple product that broke down (iPhone) after warranty expired but still within the 1-year extended Amex coverage.

Not so awesome about the T410i of course. But take it from me, buy enough products from any laptop company and they'll all let you down eventually, the differentiator is how easy they make a replacement (i.e. support and warranty quality) and how often they let down a large set of customers, which is hard to find statistics on.

 

I've always liked this description of Amex - they've taken care of me before when I was traveling on business all the time. Problems just evaporated with a single call.

 

And that post is from someone based in Norway - which truly shows their global reach and their ability to stand up for their customers. It's definitely my favorite card for purchases.

I also have a Visa and MasterCard that offers more or less the same kind of protection, but it's always a larger hassle with them. There's something about the AMEX process that makes it easy.