I guarantee that experience wasn't with American Express. My experience has been that Chase has invested heavily in automated fraud management /and/ that it works reasonably well, but they have no real paths outside their strict processes for going around it. American Express is much more personable, at least for high value accounts, and still allows you to insert travel advisories which have date ranges.

My experience as a new Amex customer has been horrid along these same lines. Everyone talks up Amex, but I'm not seeing it so far.

I had my Amex card cancelled for "non-payment," even though I paid.

Then a month later, Amex mailed me a check for the money I paid because it had no account to credit it to, because it cancelled the account.