Getting further discount when you eat out – Best Restaurant & Good Food Gift Cards

Continuing on from this post about earning points on meal reservations, you can get an additional 5% off your bill in addition to the points by paying with a Best Restaurants or Good Food Gift Card. This discount can actually be more if there are further discounts on the Gift Cards themselves at the time.

My Summary/TL;DR for this relatively short post is simply the steps for obtaining the discount:

• Buy a Woolworths Gift Card (from Cashrewards, or other) for 5% off
• Go to Woolworths and buy the relevant Good Food Gift Card or Best Restaurants Gift Card
• Pay for your bill at participating restaurants with the gift cards you’ve just purchased

The Gift Cards come in denominations of $50 and $100 and are valid from 12 months from purchase and are sold at many different retailers, including Coles, Woolworths, Big W, Target, Kmart, Officeworks, Australia Post. In fact, the Restaurant gift cards themselves are sometimes on sale, such as here (Coles, April 2017) and here (Australia Post, October 2017 – from today!). If the discount is at Woolworths or Big W, then you can use your Woolworths eGift Cards purchased at 5% off to pay for it.

General Tips:

• The amount does not have to be used up all at once
• As this is just a payment method, you can generally stack this with other promotions such as Dimmi, Entertainment Book, or Liven
• This is a great way of avoiding potential credit card surcharges at restaurants
• If you were after, for example, a Good Food Gift Card, you are better off buying it directly from Australia Post for 20% off than buying the Woolworths Gift Card at 5% off then buying the Good Food Gift Card from Woolworths/Big W
• This method allows you to effectively pay for dinner with a card that earns bonus points for supermarket spend (like the AMEX Platinum Edge) as your Credit Card expenditure was actually made at Woolworths (to buy the Gift Cards)
• If you expect your bill will be $120, then I’d recommend you buy a $100 Gift Card so you don’t have to buy an extra $50 one. Just pay for the $20 difference with your own payment method
  • However, if you’re confident you will be able to buy an additional $50 Gift Card and that you can use up the balance within 12 months, then buy a $50 Gift Card and just keep it for your next bill at a participating restaurant
• Participating restaurants may differ between Good Food & Best Restaurants slightly – search for participating restaurants: Best Restaurants/Good Food
• Random “fact”: Good Food Gift Cards cost restaurants a 22% transaction fee

Any comments? Feel free to leave comments, questions, etc. and don’t forget to subscribe!!