Although pieces of this were being discussed in another thread, I decided it might help to have a specific one just in relation to Rewards Network.

With Apple Pay being released in the US, the question arises about how well it works (or does not work) with various rewards based schemes. I am interested what happens when using Apple Pay at a Merchant that is in the Rewards Network. Rather than wait around I decided to run a little test.

Contrary to what Apple seems to say, Apple Pay appears to work at any merchant that has NFC available at their registers. In fact there is a handy little iPhone App called MasterCard Nearby that you can look up which merchants in a particular area offer NFC for payment. I loaded that, cross checked my MileagePlan Dining app, then looked for something inexpensive - boom, Jack In The Box.

The - Test
I placed 2 separate orders (don't worry they were inexpensive single item orders); one using ApplePay, the other swiping the card.

The Result
The ApplePay/NFC transaction was not picked up by Rewards Network. And as expected, the swiped card transaction was and I received my miles.

Note that when using Apple Pay, it basically assigns a unique ID to the credit card and ties it to the phone. So in this case the receipt for the Apple Pay transaction notes the card number as something like xxxxxxxxx1234. However the transaction with the swipe notes the actual physical card number xxxxxxxxx5678 (for example). The issue is that Rewards Network only has my physical card registered xxxxxxxxx5678. So the test is trying to determine if when using ApplePay will I miss out on my Rewards Network miles.