I joined I-Dine US Air and went and looked at the bonus page. I guess maybe depending on the airline you affiliate yourself with, the bonusus are different... I may need to change airlines to one that has more potential.... anyway.....

If I dine 12 times in a calendar year, I get 1000 bonus points, but what constitues a 'dine'? I don't see a minimum dollar amount listed. Can I go and buy a soda on my debit card a couple of times a day for a week to qualify? Seems like they'd be smart enough to disallow that.

Thanks!

Some promotions have minimum tabs indicated (usually $25, sometimes $15). If you do not see a minimum specified anywhere in the terms & conditions, then there is no minimum. Enjoy your 12 sodas!

Points

Note: charging the exact same amount at the same place on the same day often triggers the system to reject the second purchase as a "duplicate" so try to vary your spending slightly. You really don't want to have to be bothered with sending in receipts for a couple of bucks each for retroactive credit.

If the bonus doesn't list a minimum spending amount, there is no minimum spending amount per iDine.

SOME restaurants do have a minumum for charging to a credit card, tho, so watch out for that! One inexpensive one where I dine frequently last year started up a $10 minimum, and I had trouble meeting that with full meals half the time, at least before I added the tip but they imposed the minimum on the initial ringup amount! (That restaurant left the iDine program a couple months later, so I no longer have to "worry" about it.) Another one near here has a $15 credit card minimum mentioned at the bottom of the menu on their website, tho when I visited the restaurant I didn't see anything posted about that anywhere (but my pre-tip bill came to over $15 only because of a substitution charge!).

Furthermore, some restaurants only allow you one visit per month (in terms of posting to iDine).

Now, as to what is a "visit": Visits that are for (at least slightly) different amounts very clearly MANY hours apart (like you went there for lunch and again for dinner) shouldn't be as much of a problem. But there have been cases where different amounts charged too close together in time ended up being COMBINED by the time they got to iDine, and thus didn't count as separate visits.

I use the US and UA programs. During the most recent promos (2-4-6-8) on both, the majority of the times, my "dines" resulted from just a soda (about $130 each)!

I was previously elite on UA, so I can not say otherwise about UA. But I did not use US previously this year.

When I log on to my US account, I see the following message:

"Dine 2 more times before 12/31/05 to get to elite status!"

Of the 10 dines, 1 was a "large" dine of $10.00 or so. The other 9 "dines" were all sodas, ranging between $1.50 and $3.00 each

So a soda would count as a dine, as long as the program or restaurant does not specify a minimum amount per charge. Enjoy the sodas!

Does soup count as a meal??

It has for me! I just had lobster bisque and water for lunch, with the bill adding up to $6.00 total. It counted as a dine !

Bear in mind that Visa and MC do not permit a merchant to set any minimum for accepting a card. If you turn them in they will get a warning from the card company to cease and desist setting minimums as it is expressly forbidden by the merchant agreement they have with the card processor.

I have found some merchants that, although they do not have a "minimum charge", if the charge is below $4.00, they add a $0.25 surcharge.

Is this OK? After all, they still accept MC for a $2 bill - they just add a surcharge under a certain amount. Should I report them?