Originally Posted by cactuspete
Plenty of reasons:
1. Easy mileage credit to keep a FF account alive.
2. Many of the iDine bonus promos are X dines = bonus miles.
3. Airline promos often give credit for dines, regardless of amount, as a "qualifying activity".
4. Easy way to get the 12 dines neeeded for elite status.
5. Not everybody lives or works near a participating iDine restaurant (or has the time to get to one).
Didn't you read what I said? I said (a) random gift certificates that you won't have a way to use, and (b) my example was 20 miles per $, which already included a iDine bonus!
Now, yes, if you combine 1 and 3 (aren't they the same?) and 5 and combine that with someone who rarely
travels to somewhere where there's an iDine restaurant, then I guess occasionally buying the smallest gift certificate you can might make sense. But only as much sense, say, as buying some flowers from FTD (which also gives miles) that you don't need.
#4 makes no sense to me. If you need elite iDine status, it's only so that you can get to dines where you'll pay 10 cents a mile. Until you get there, you're paying about 33 cents a mile! Why in the world get random gift certficates from somewhere far across the country just to do that? If you don't have iDine restaurants near you (or near where you are in your travels oftens enough), why in the world do you care whether you're elite at iDine?!?
Again, if you can make use of the gift certificates, that's completely different.
I was just asking about gift cerficates you
have no use for, and therefore you've done little else but pay for some miles at a very poor rate (in particular, at a much poorer rate than buying miles from the airline itself, which also counts as activity and therefore keeps your miles from expiring. But with rare exceptions, any iDine restaurant at a random place in the country that sells gift certificates online is going to give you gift certificates you have no use for, right? If you can't use iDine otherwise, I'm not clear on why iDine rather than, say, a mileage mall? If you can use iDine, why not actually dine and get some value out of it, or at least buy a local gift certificate (that you could at least give as a gift, if you don't want to use it yourself)?
Now, there would be an exception if, as stated by someone else, the gift certificates could be bought at a member of national restaurant chain, where that location of the chain participates but most other locations of the same chain don't (say, Denny's). But that's not what the OP asked for, just any restaurant anywhere...