Dining Hacks: How to Quadruple Dip to Earn Miles and Points While Dining Out + Savings & More

I am sure we all love tasty food and dining out at a nice restaurant and going out for a date night or just an easy and relaxed evening, where you don’t have to spend hours in the kitchen cooking food and then spend more time cleaning up afterward. Because of my nomadic lifestyle, I don’t get many chances to dine in and, therefore, mostly eat at restaurants or have food delivered. Here are the dining hacks I learned from being on the road.

Here are a few dining hacks on how you can get even more out of your next dining adventure when you are a bit strategic. This strategy has worked for me multiple times. But there are some caveats to it. Most likely, if you want to go to a high-end restaurant, they won’t participate in these programs, as they don’t need these extra ways of luring customers in. Also, many chains won’t participate; there are some exceptions to this. It also depends on your location. You will have more luck in cities than in a small town in the middle of nowhere. 

But before you can get a lot of points, miles, and cash back for your next dining experience, you must do some leg work first. Let’s start from the beginning.

Credit Cards

First, for most of these strategies below to work, you need a credit card. So, get your wallet out and get familiar with your credit cards. You want to make sure you have a credit card, which gives you some form of miles, points, or cash-back earning option. It all depends on your wallet. If you have multiple cards, check which one earns bonus points in the dining category. Examples here would be the Chase Sapphire Reserve (3x on dining), Chase Sapphire Preferred (3x on dining), or the Amex Gold Card (4x on dining). These are just a few examples. If you want to sign up for one of these cards, please use one of my links. You will get bonus points for signing up with the link and support me as well.

Earning credit card points and miles will work with any restaurant that lets you pay with your card. But we want to maximize our return. Let’s go ahead and learn some dining hacks.

Apps

Sign up for the apps below to earn points, miles, and cashback for your restaurant visit. But you must do your research. Not every restaurant is available with every service mentioned below. Do your research. It doesn’t have to take long. I found the restaurant – Gumba’s Italian Restaurant & Pizzeria – with just a quick search on every platform, which didn’t take longer than 10 minutes in total. I will use this restaurant as my example in this post, but there are many other restaurants for which this works.  

Receipts

Even when you are done dining and paid for your meal, you are not done earning more. Make use of the receipt. There are many receipt-scanning services out there that let you earn rewards by just snapping a picture of the receipt. No credit card is required; you only have to sign up for an account and scan away. You won’t get rich by doing that, even if you scan lots of receipts. Many apps have daily and/or monthly limits on how many receipts you can scan. The earning potential is rather low too. Mostly you earn one cent per scanned receipt. But it can add up. I made a few hundred dollars this way as well over a few years. Nobody said it’s easy if you want to totally maximize everything. It is demanding work. 

Cashback Portals

Use a cashback portal like Rakuten to earn even with this purchase cashback or even points. To find out who has the best deal on cashback with a retailer, you can use cashbackmonitor.com. But it’s not always the best approach to use the portal with the highest approach if you never use that portal again. Use your favorite portal and stack your reward in it to maximize your earnings. If you choose Rakuten, you can even earn valuable Amex Membership Rewards points. 

Shopping Portals

Many airlines nowadays have a shopping portal. Pick the airline you fly most or have a lot of miles with to top off your account with these purchases through the shopping portal. Don’t deposit your miles into an account with barely any miles if you have others with lots of miles. You would have to spend so much money to get even the possibility of redeeming these points and miles for something. Shopping portals are a great way to top off your existing balance. Of course, if you are just starting. Pick the airline you think you will spend most flying or at least crediting miles to and top this one off. Just don’t spread your points all over the place.

Tips

Backup receipts

Make sure you snap a picture of the receipt even if you don’t scan receipts for extra rewards. There could always be a system issue or glitch and your transaction won’t go through and you will miss out on your rewards. Wait until everything has been posted, and then delete the receipts. 

Consolidate points

As mentioned earlier, for most people, it makes sense to consolidate their earnings on a few accounts they own. Don’t spread your miles and points all over the place. Then you have 100.000 points/miles, but you can’t use them for anything because they are scattered over dozens of accounts and can’t be combined. Focus on a redemption you want to achieve in the future and use these ways to earn extra miles and points towards this redemption.

Rakuten Hack

One amazing hack is using Rakuten instead of your airline or hotel dining program. Rakuten also uses the RewardsNetwork and therefore you must choose where you want to have your rewards credited too. There is one advantage to using Rakuten but only if you are an American Express cardholder and collect their Membership Rewards points. Rakuten lets you choose to earn your “Big Fat Check” as Membership Rewards points rather than cashback. Membership Rewards points are transferable currency, and you can credit them to a bunch of their airline and hotel partners. However, be aware, that some of the airlines and hotels offering a dining program, are not transfer partners from American Express.

Conclusion

I hope I was able to give you a bit of an incentive to do your research to maximize your reward earnings. There might be even more dining hacks and stackable options out there. 

Be also aware that not every restaurant is listed at every service. Sometimes a restaurant can be on the RewardsNetwork but won’t show up in Upside or vice versa. But also, don’t focus solely on maximizing. Go out to places you want to eat at. This time of maximizing your dining spent can take some time for research but you will get faster as you do it more often. For me, to find out that I had all these stacking points, took me about 10 minutes. Don’t get mad if you missed a stacking; there, there is always next time. Learn from your mistakes and build upon them. Nobody is perfect. 

These dining hacks had a positive influence on my dining habits. I got to dine more at local restaurants than I used to before. I used to just seek out nationwide chains and overlooked local mom-and-pop shops. Sometimes you can find some hidden gems and you get tremendously rewarded for it as well. 

What about you? Do you know of more dining hacks you can share with us? Leave them in the comments below.