It is possible for an IDine restaurant to process your charge and have it not earn pooints, but there are controls in place --

They must know in advance that the card they are about to swipe is an IDine point-earner. They must have a contractually valid reason to disqualify the card from points; they then swipe the card through a special, stand-alone dial-up terminal, also entering a code to identify the reason for the Idine bypass. All bypass transactions are subject to a special audit by Idine (i.e. they'll want to see guest check reprints).

The process is usually seen at restaurants that do a lot of banquet business -- It's a standard Idine condition that points cannot be earned for payments relating to dining with pre-arranged menus or prices that are not on the normal menu. Gift certificates are also disallowed under the Idine standard terms.

As a practical matter, however, bypasses are rare, even for establishments that bother to get the equipment. There are compelling internal control reasons to run all charges through the POS system. Nonstandard transactions are bothersome to track. At my restaurant, we eventually gave up on using their bypass setup -- we only had 1 bypass terminal (normal charges can be swiped at 7 different places on the property), and no one ever remembered the transaction codes we were supposed to enter.

Also, if a restaurant is paying back an Idine loan, then gift certificates can be a cost-effective way to meet the obligation -- they're never all redeemed, so the cost of paying off the loan with GC sales is discounted compared to payoff through actual dinner checks processed through Idine.