iDine/Rewards Network - Reataurant.com promos better deal than IDINE?

Would you think that when you get 50 or sometimes 60% off from purchasing Restaurant.com certificates, this is a better deal than getting 3, 5, 10 or even 20 miles per dollar spent with IDINE or taking their 15% cash discount?

Would you think that when you get 50 or sometimes 60% off from purchasing Restaurant.com certificates, this is a better deal than getting 3, 5, 10 or even 20 miles per dollar spent with IDINE or taking their 15% cash discount?
Well, it depends a lot on how you use miles, and how you dine!

If you only use them to get domestic coach flights (25000 miles instead of paying a few hundred dollars), cash discounts which get you to BUYING the ticket outright faster than you could earn those 25000 miles may obviously be a better deal.

HOWEVER:

- If you use miles for ways which you cannot use cash (for example, 1 million AA miles from ANY and all sources -- including AA iDine -- gets you to lifetime Gold and 2 million AA miles gets you to lifetime Platinum), and other than buying 40000 miles a year for $1000 a pop there's no way you could use cash to build up those miles in much less than a few decades, then obviously miles may be more worth it than cash NO MATTER WHAT, because you can't get miles elsewhere.

- If you use miles in ways that are worth WAY MORE than 25000 miles for a domestic coach flight (for example, international upgrades to business), your miles can easily be worth 5 to 8 cents a mile in those cases (if the ability to upgrade would actually affect whether you could/would take the flight; obviously it doesn't equal that if you would have flown economy instead if you hadn't had the miles). 5 cents a mile in a situation where iDine pays 10 miles/$ would be 50 cents/$ or would require 50% cashback (on enough dines to pay for an outright business class ticket!) to make up for that.

- The problem with doing the math on restaurant.com certificates is that they have very varied restrictions, and typically you buy something like $25 for $10 but then need a minimum of $35 spend, and that means that if your bill is EXACTLY $35 you spend $20 and thus save less than 50% already, but if your bill ends up under $35 you save 0%, and if your bill is $50 you spend $35 and thus save only about 30%, etc. You thus have to predict your spending EXTREMELY accurately to be able to get the "nominal" savings. ... On the other hand, the normal iDine (before bonuses), for anyone who's done 12 or more dines in the past or current year, earns you 10 miles on every dollar spent, and it doesn't matter if you spend a few dollars less on one dine and a few dollars more on another, it all earns the same. (Some occasional bonuses have minimums, true, but that's going beyond the basic everyday 10 miles/$ that you're comparing against.)

- If you use EITHER of these programs to dine at more expensive restaurants than you would otherwise eat at, and you're earning cashback, you're not really saving money! (Obviously, if you go out of your way to eat at more expensive restaurants to earn miles YOU COULDN'T HAVE EARNED/BOUGHT ANY OTHER WAY, that is the one circumstance it may make sense.)

- The cool thing about iDine is that (at most restaurants) it works even if you didn't know in advance that the restaurant participated. And at many (most?) restaurants it works on every repeat visit. With restaurant.com, you have to keep buying certificates over and over, so you need a lot more advance planning.

- Restaurant.com requires printing certificates, so it's useless when you don't have access to a printer. This is FlyerTalk, a website for (among others) frequent flyers! For those of us who use iDine while visiting other cities, and find the restaurant from the laptop in our hotel room, there's generally no way to print certificates at that time, so restaurant.com would be useless in those cases, while iDine works just fine. Gosh, even if you're out locally with friends and you decide "on impulse" to eat at a restaurant.com place, and you have a web-enabled cell phone or PDA, you're STILL out of luck without a printer (but in fine shape with iDine in the same circumstance).

So, in conclusion:

If you use miles in a way that they're worth only 1 to 2 cents a mile to you, and you have time/ability to predict EXACTLY how much you'll spend at a restaurant on one visit before you buy a restaurant.com certficate (so that you'll know at the time you buy it just how much you'll get back from it), AND you would have dined at that or an equivalently-priced restaurant ANYWAY, then may it'll work for you.

For me, it's (a) not worth it to get cashback anytime I can get miles instead, and (b) not worth it to have to always plan so much in advance (both where I'll eat and exactly how much I'll spend there).

Sd search: thank you. Super analysis.