How to earn loyalty points and rewards, and keep them

The short answer

You earn loyalty points or rewards by doing the thing the program counts — usually visiting, or spending — while identified. Identified is the part people miss. A purchase made without scanning the card, giving the phone number or opening the app earns nothing, and in most programs it cannot be added afterwards.

So: join before you buy, present the card at the till rather than after, and check the balance moved before you leave.

What you are actually earning

Two different currencies get called the same thing.

Stamps count visits. Ten visits, one reward. The value is easy: you know exactly what the reward is and exactly how far away it is.

Points count spend. You earn some number per pound, and later you spend them on something. The value is not obvious, and it is deliberately not obvious.

To find out what your points are worth, divide the cash value of a reward by the points it costs.

500 points for a £5 voucher = 1p per point. Earning 1 point per £1 spent means the program returns 1% of what you spend.

Do that division once for every card in your wallet and the picture changes. Programs that sound generous because they hand out a lot of points are often the ones worth the least per point. The count is marketing; the division is the answer.

How to earn faster, without spending more

• Be identified every single time. The most points anyone loses are the ones never earned because they were in a hurry.
• Consolidate visits where the program counts transactions. If the rule is one stamp per transaction, two separate purchases earn two. If it is one per customer per day, they earn one. Read which.
• Use the multipliers. Most programs run bonus periods — double points on a slow day, extra on a launch. They are the only way to genuinely accelerate a balance.
• Ask when you are close. Shops honour “you’re one short” far more often than people expect, especially when the person asking is a face they know.
• Do not join everything. Ten cards each 10% complete is worth nothing. Three you actually finish is worth three rewards.

Why balances expire, and what to do about it

Unredeemed points are a liability on the issuer’s books. Expiry is how that liability gets cleared, and it is why almost every points program has one.

Common shapes:

• Fixed term. Points expire twelve or twenty-four months after they are earned.
• Inactivity. The balance clears after a period with no earning or spending. This is the common one, and it is also the one you can defeat: a single small purchase usually resets the whole clock.
• Annual reset. Everything zeroes on a date. Rare outside tiers.

Two habits cover almost all of it. Know which shape your program uses — it is in the terms, and it is one sentence. And if a balance is worth having, spend it rather than saving it, because a point is worth the most on the day it is earned and never more later.

Stamp cards mostly avoid this. A card with a visible count of nine is hard to forget in a way a numeric balance is not, which is one of the real arguments in stamp cards versus points.

How to redeem without losing anything

Say it before they ring it up. Most tills cannot apply a reward after the transaction has closed, and reversing it means a refund and a re-sale.

Check the reward is in stock. A free coffee on a machine that is down is a wasted trip.

Watch the balance change. The moment to catch an error is at the counter, with the person who can fix it.

Keep the record. A digital card keeps its own history. A paper one keeps none, so a disputed count is a disagreement rather than a lookup.

What to do when it goes wrong

Missing points from a purchase you made while identified are usually recoverable if you have the receipt and ask soon. Small businesses fix these on the spot; large ones have a form.

A lost paper card is generally gone, and no amount of politeness recovers a count nobody wrote down. A lost digital card usually is not — it is tied to whatever identified you, and asking is worth thirty seconds.

If a program changes its terms mid-card, ask them to honour the one you started under. In a local shop this nearly always works, because the person you are asking is the person who set the rule.

Which programs are actually worth carrying

Three questions, in order:

1. What is the reward, in things you would have bought anyway? A free coffee at a place you already go is real. A 5% voucher for a shop you visit twice a year is not.
2. How long to the first reward at your actual rate? Anything past about ten weeks will be abandoned. That is not a failure of willpower; it is how the threshold was set.
3. What is a point worth in pence? One division. If the answer is under half a penny per pound spent, the program is a mailing list with a loyalty theme.

The best programs by this test are almost always the small ones — a single cafe, a single barber — because the reward is a real thing you wanted and the threshold is reachable. The large ones win on breadth and lose on both of the numbers that matter.