No loss of interest here. Actually quickly picked up elite status in a second program since US Airways was a loser on the last promo round.

I am as interested as ever. I stop by here every couple of days to make sure I am not missing anything.

I had a reason to talk to the idine airline liason a few days ago. She says they are growing the program. She also said that our letters last year had a huge impact in keeping the 10 miles per $ alive. She suggests we give them plenty of feedback before July 1 in order to keep the status quo. She insists that they listen to us!

I'm a bit confused. Yes, it is now 10% cash back, but if you mostly used the cashback before, how does it help you get to 2MM lifetime (Plat) at AA? :)

Second, I don't get "used to get...10 FF miles/$" but "now it's...very little in mileage". It's STILL 10 FF miles/$ (ok, they call it 5+5, but in my calculator that sitll adds up to 10). Are you simply saying that you find fewer bonuses? I've only been in iDine about 3 years, and in that time, I've never seen CONSTANT bonuses, but nice bonuses do run SOME months (like the 250 bonus miles per dine at AA for a couple months last fall). Did they really run a nice bonus EVERY MONTH 6-7 years ago?

It was simple: I had 1 CC tied to the Cashback program and a different CC tied to AA Dining. Had one going for UA Dining as well, but rarely used it.

When I went to the AA Dining site a month or so ago (in response to a bonus offer email), a bunch of restaurants were listed as 1 mile/$ or 3 miles/$. They've put in some sort of tiered structure that I'm not too familiar with - essentially "elite status" for iDine. So to get back to 10 miles/$, I think I'd have to go do a bunch of cups of coffee somewhere first. I guess I don't have the energy to work at it that hard anymore - I crossed 1MM and I have a crapload of AA miles banked. So now I'm just doing Cashback.

In the old days, there truly were bonuses every month - sometimes bonuses upon bonuses - especially if you were an AA Gold/Plat flier. There was a standing 3-dines-500 mile bonus that I received monthly. Since a lot of these dines were lunches, it was a pretty significant kicker on top of normal earnings.

Right now, I'm at about 1.1MM lifetime on AA without much need to fly them regularly right now. It's simply hard to get motivated to pass up Cashback - even 10% - in order to earn a slow trickle of AA miles. Perhaps if I start commuting to Dallas or Chicago, I'll change my tune and start cranking away on the AA earnings again.

Oh, yes, that indicates you didn't do 12 AA dines last year (even though there were some "dine x times, get NNNN bonus miles" promos also last year).

I had a hard time SEEING the 3 mile/$ listings, because even those airline where I though I hadn't done 12 dines it turned out I had. (I'm with AA, UA, BA, NW, and now Priority Club, plus DC cashback, but lots of my favorites are 1/month around here, so I have to either rotate among all the cards or not get ANYTHING for dines there after 1 or 2 a month if I only had AA and a cashback.)

You should only see 1 mile/$ if you don't log in. As soon as you have a profile (which they can't tell until you log in), you're at least at 3 mile/$.

The funny thing is, there was plenty of advance notice of this, but NO advance notice of the 5+5=10 "elite" tier before the structure change July 1 last year. So all the people who were staying on top of the news were dining like crazy before July 1, thinking it was their last chance ever to earn 10 miles/$. Then July 1 hit, and it turned out that ALL restaurants had become 10 miles/$ (for "elites"), and of course everyone who had dined like crazy in previous months was automatically elite! :)

Now, once again, they're warning us that the "elite bonus" (the 5+5 instead of just 5) will end this June 30, and of course we won't know what (if anything) replaces it until July 1... :(

Thanks for the info, Stefan. I guess the moral of the story is: drop by the iDine Flyertalk forum once in a while if you plan on staying involved in the mileage programs in the future! :)

I agree that it works best if one diversifies into a few programs. With DL and PC bonuses, I should be able to just about hit elite 2007 anyway fairly soon, whether they offer any great extension or not. With AA and AS, I still try to at least keep an average of one transaction per month so as not to have to "scramble" later in the year.

since i work out in chicago IDine is great to me. The restaurant in the hotel is part of the program so i am earining miles on almost every dinner i eat. Also alot of the restaurants outside of Manhattan specifically Queens and Long Island are getting on board so more miles for me.

Last year, somewhere in this forum, I had predicted that my Idining would go down by about half. I am less passionate about Idine, but this says more about my lack of focus and on achieving LT AA plat status than about Idine (case in point, yesterday Mrs. Jailer asked me about a restaurant for a dinner party of eight we are part of and I told her that I’d just, “go with the flow.” Heretofore I’d try to manage the restaurant selection and see about putting a goodly amount on a card). However, on the plus side, Idine appears to be expanding in my neck of the woods and places where I travel.

All this said, I project about 60,000 Idine miles for 2006, so I have clearly not abandoned Idine.

Well-possibly to induce additional constructive discussions for all of our benefit: so far in 06 we have not used any new one since got about 70,000 miles in o5 and some of those were gift cards. So we used up a small amount of gift cards only.