Earn up to 11x points and miles on food delivery
It’s been a long day at work. You still have a lot of things to do at home, including make dinner, and then you’ll have to clean up all the pots and pans used to make dinner. Or, like many people, you open up your favorite food delivery app and start searching through the options for dinner. While ordering food delivery is not the most frugal choice, it’s convenience can’t be understated. And if you’re ordering food, even infrequently, why not earn the maximize number of points and miles on that food delivery? After all, if you do that, you’re saving money on future trips when you redeem those points and miles, right?
Credit Cards to use
While not a way to accrue points and miles, select credit cards have benefits with food delivery providers. Our favorite travel hacking starter card, the Chase Sapphire Preferred, offers free DashPass with your card. Considering DoorDash codes as dining and the Chase Sapphire Preferred earns 3x on dining, this is a no-brainer!
The American Express Gold has a $10 monthly credit for Uber (or Uber Eats). It also has a $10 monthly credit that can be used for GrubHub. The card itself earns 4x on dining, so using it with a food delivery service like DoorDash or GrubHub means you’re earning elevated points.
Even if you don’t have a credit card with these built-in food delivery benefits, there are many cards that offer elevated points and miles on dining. The Freedom Unlimited and Freedom Flex (both have no annual fee) offer 3x Chase Ultimate Rewards points on dining. Our co-branded cards, the United Explorer card and the Marriott Bonvoy Boundless, offer 2x miles and 4x points on dining respectively.
For Q2 2024, the original Freedom and the Freedom Flex have restaurants as a 5x category.
From a payment perspective, you should never be using a credit card that earns fewer than 2x points and miles on food delivery.
Shopping Portals
The majority of food delivery services do not partner with shopping portals for recurring purchases. There are select benefits for first-time users on several airline portals or on Rakuten. New Uber Eats users, for example, can earn up to $3.00 (300 AmEx Membership Rewards points) from Rakuten.
United MileagePlus X app
This is one of our favorite simple ways to super-charge your mile earnings. It’s a gift card portal where you can buy yourself a gift card for United miles. This is in addition to the credit card points you’d earn from the purchase anyway. We have more details in this blog post. Here are some of the food delivery multipliers on the app right now:
- DoorDash – 4 miles / dollar
- GrubHub – 2 miles / dollar
- UberEats – 2 miles / dollar
If you do use the United MileagePlus X app, make sure you use your Chase cards for these purchases. Purchases through the app code as the typical category for Chase, but American Express does not. You don’t want to miss out on credit card points at the expense of earning miles, especially on a 3, 4, or 5x earning opportunity.
How we maximize
As mentioned in the credit card section, restaurants are a 5x category on the Freedom and Freedom Flex. The Freedom Flex also always offers 3x on restaurants/dining. The way that’s handled in the quarterly category is that it becomes 7x – 1x for all purchases, 2x for the typical dining spend, and 4x for the quarterly category points.
DoorDash is our choice of food delivery because their fees are typically lower than GrubHub. And, as Chase Sapphire Preferred cardholders, we get free DashPass. So, in order to earn 11x points and miles on food delivery, we purchase a DoorDash gift card through the United MileagePlus X app using the Freedom Flex. That’s 4x United miles and 7x Chase Ultimate Rewards points, helping us earn 11x points and miles on food delivery. We also receive an added bonus of 25% miles on the MileagePlus X app purchase simply for holding a United card.
If you don’t have plans to order food delivery but know you’ll use it eventually, you can buy the gift card while the Freedom and Freedom Flex have the elevated points earnings and load it onto your account for future use.
