SyncAssist: Making AmEx Sync easy


a screenshot of a social media account

I know there are a bunch of folks who love the American Express Sync promos. Getting a statement credit for making purchases you would’ve made anyways is a great way to save a bit of money and it is essentially free. Except for the time to keep track of what promos are available and make sure that you’re registered and such. Plus, what if you have multiple AmEx cards? Do you really want to manage multiple Twitter accounts to register all of them for every promo. And do you want to be filling your feed with this stuff rather than photos of your meals or other, useful tweets? I have never signed up for Sync for all the reasons above. It just wasn’t worth the energy to me. But I’ve been thinking about it a bit lately and wondered if there was a better way to interact with the platform, an assistant that could make registration and managing accounts easier. Welcome to SyncAssist.

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The concept is pretty simple: You link your Twitter account to SnycAssist once. From there the system takes over, monitoring the AmEx feed for which promos are active and making sure to register you for them. It sends out the tweets on your behalf and AmEx recognizes them, acknowledging the registration for each offer.

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I never see your Twitter password; it is all handled by the oAuth system and you control access.
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Just relax; you’re registered and the registrations are coming.

Once the system does a sweep (happens every 10 minutes or so, subject to change) you’ll start to see the tweets fill up on your timeline. The initial seed will have a bunch of AmEx Sync tweets because there are a bunch available. As time goes on, however, it should only be one or two at a time since you’ll always be current with whatever is available. Here’s one from a test account showing what happens if you have not yet set up a sync account with AmEx:

There are also messages like this one if the promo is maxed out, though hopefully none of the users here will ever see it again:

And, once the system has started tweeting for you it will also keep a cached copy of all the tweets so you can quickly go back and verify that you’ve registered for one (click the time/date to link to the full conversation on Twitter showing AmEx’s response, too).

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All registered users of the Wandering Aramean Travel Tools site can link a single Twitter account to SyncAssist. If you don’t want to bother your regular followers with Sync tweets this is a good time to set up a second Twitter account, link it to your AmEx and SyncAssist and mostly forget about it. If you have multiple AmEx cards and want to manage all of them via SyncAssist that is also possible, so long as you are a First Class member on the site. The link at the top to “Register a different Twitter account with SyncAssist” will allow for multiple Twitter accounts if you’re a First Class member. If you’re not it will replace the currently registered account with the new one. If you’ve got a bunch of AmEx cards and Twitter accounts this is an easy way to make sure they’re all registered all the time.

And, of course, there’s always the option to remove access from SyncAssist. Simply click the Delink link. That will remove the authorization from my side. It will also provide you a link to revoke access from the Twitter side. Or you can just do it from the Twitter side and SyncAssist will stop trying next time it goes through the list of promos.

I’ve done a bunch of testing and had help debugging from a number of users as well. And I think everything is running smoothly. Of course, that’s always subject to discovery of new bugs (feel free to report them below). So, give it a shot and let me know how it goes.

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Seth Miller

I'm Seth, also known as the Wandering Aramean. I was bit by the travel bug 30 years ago and there's no sign of a cure. I fly ~200,000 miles annually; these are my stories. You can connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

21 Comments

  1. I am in a big dilemma….I need to book 2 RT tickets from USA to India and 1 RT ticket from India to USA for travel within the next 2 months. Air fares during this peak season are off the roof….Travel dates for all the 3 are different….We first need to pick an airline which suits our needs and then need to make sure we get the best rates….
    1st Ticket IAH(18thMay)-BOM
    BOM(15th Aug)-LON
    LON(20thAug)-IAH
    2nd Ticket IAH(11thJun)-BOM
    BOM(15th Aug)-LON
    LON(20thAug)-IAH
    3rd Ticket BOM(15thAug)-LON
    LON(20th Aug)-IAH
    IAH(3rd Sep)-BOM
    All of us wanna travel on the same airline so we could have a stopover in London together.
    We are members of United Mileage and American advantage. We don’t have enough miles to buy free tickets yet.
    Any inputs or thoughts on airline selection, booking sites and method are welcome
    Thanks
    Mike

  2. Very impressive. I’m interested in syncassist for my multiple twitter accounts. what does it take to be a first class member?

  3. While this is cool and unique, I can’t help but wonder once Amex sniff’s this, they will end the Sync deal for abuse such as this. Why shout this from the horn Seth? Could have maybe kept this under wraps.

  4. Nice, as far as it goes.
    Is there a way to submit ones that it misses to help others out?

    There are local offers, so it is worthwhile to check your online account, and there are often travel related sync deals that are only offered through tripadvisor. Since trip advisor lets you create as many accounts as you want a killer feature would be to figure out a way to automate those as well. I’m pretty sure there is no way to automate:
    unsync from twitter,
    sync to tripadvisor,
    grab the offers,
    unsync from tripadvisor,
    re sync to twitter.
    Repeat.

    A girl can dream.

  5. Thanks for the tool and I am starting to use it as a First Class member.

    What are the menu choices to get to the sync tool page from the wandr.me home page? I can use the direct link but can not find on the menu.

    Since i have registered multiple cards, is there a way to see which twitter accounts are registered? As cards come and go, it would make linking and delinking maintainance much easier.

    Thanks.

  6. But syncing is the easy part; the hard part is remembering *which* AmEx card you’ve synced the promos to. Any tips on that?

  7. There seems to be a problem when I login and click “register a new twitter account” it gives me a pop-up error message saying something like “that didn’t work so well”. Am I erring somehow? I just wanted to add a newly created twitter account in addition to all the others previously created which none of I want to de-link.

  8. SyncAssist is a great idea. It seems to have been working at first, but I no get signed up for offers even though they do appear in my amex twitter feed. Is it still working?

  9. Signed up as a First Class member to be able to sync multiple cards, but it is not working for me. Get the “did not work so well” pop up when I try and sync a new account.
    Any suggestions?

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