Dining rewards programs can be a great way to rack up extra benefits for money you’d spend anyway. Virtually every airline and hotel program participates in iDine (or something similar), whereby you can earn bonus miles/points for dining at select restaurants. They sometimes run lucrative promotions beyond the standard earning rate, which can make it quite rewarding.
I was just made aware of MOGL, which seems way more generous than any of the other dining rewards programs I’ve seen. Basically they offer you 10% cash back for dining at any of their partner restaurants if you’re paying with a credit card linked to MOGL. And keep in mind that’s in addition to the points you’d otherwise earn on a credit card. So you can still use a credit card that accrues bonus points for dining (like the Chase Sapphire Preferred). Another cool thing they do is donate a meal to someone in need when you spend a minimum of $20 at a MOGL restaurant.
You get paid monthly to your debit/credit card as long as your balance is at least $10. If your balance is below $10, the amount rolls over to the following month.
The only catch is that as of now they only have restaurants in California (mostly San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco).
The way I actually found out about this is that last week I had a blog dinner in San Francisco, and the restaurant we ate at, TXOCO, actually belonged to the program. One of the attendees pointed out she received cash back through this, so I feel like a total idiot for us not getting cash back on the entire check.
And for those of you that think this sounds too good to be true, check out this Huffington Post article which seems to explain their business model:
To do that, MOGL offers three separate incentives to customers — cash back in the amount of 10 percent of each purchase, deposited into a customer’s bank account at the end of each month; a food donation to a local charity each time a customer spends at least $20; and a monthly jackpot, typically ranging from $25 to $500, which goes to the MOGL user who spends the most at a location in any given month.
To simultaneously reap the three rewards, customers just link any credit or debit card to MOGL and then use that card to pay for a meal at a participating restaurant in one of the three West Coast cities where the service is currently available. MOGL takes a 15 percent cut of users’ spending from restaurants, with 10 percent going back to each customer in the form of cash back, 4 percent going to MOGL, and 1 percent going toward the monthly jackpot.
“We’ve designed something that’s working exceptionally well,” says Carder, citing a study that the company conducted on 89 participating restaurants and 2,000 users in the network. “We compared those MOGL customers to the restaurants’ typical customers, and our users spent about 71 percent more.”
MOGL also offers a referral bonus. New members get $10 credit just for being referred to MOGL, and the person doing the referring gets $10 after the new member does their first dine. You can sign up through my link in order to earn the $10 referral bonus at http://www.mogl.com/BenSchlappig, though feel free to post your own link below as well so others can use it.
To those of you that live in a city with MOGL restaurants, have you used them yet?
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