I have to totally disagree with you SST. I know you are in CA and anything trendy or fashionable hits there first. But, here in SAT (and other places I travel to) I have accumulated a boatload of miles from Idine. The restaurants I go to don't have restrictions and they post to my mileage accounts 98% of the time.
I like this program because it is so lucrative and requires a minimum amount of time to monitor. I hope the program stays around a long long time. It is just the easiest way to get miles for something we all do anyway.
When I travel I rip out the corresponding pages from my Idine book and try to sample the restaurants. I have had very good luck so far.
<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by SST:
Reality Check: I-Dine screws up at least 5-10% of the time, requiring you to really audit the credits. I-Dine is slowly changing every darned restaurant over to "No Friday or Saturday" service, eliminating miles for your Fri/Sat meals. Numerous of the I-dine restuarants are changing over to "only get miles for lunch" type deals, too, thus further turning this into a big darned puzzle, requiring you to spend a lot of time fooling with the system or book to get actual miles........
In short, it is become even less user-friendly than it was. AND according to the articles in Barrons, etc., they are in danger of collapsing if they don't actually make it this year....... A start-up which may go down, so we may have "GAME OVER" without warning at any time.
Yes, I play the games as noted above. Yes, I like I-dine when it works. But this is not a reliable partner---- those of us who have been using them for years know all too well how "high involvement" this requires you to be, or else you find that the benefits are not as advertised. I wish them well. I hope they succeed, and that I gain many thousands of miles in the future. But given the "never quite ready for prime time" act they display, I await the sad day......</font>