Spend £50, get £25 back with Amex / London Restaurant Festival – and how to exploit it

The London Restaurant Festival is back this year, running from 3rd to 21st October.

Amex is again sponsoring the festival, and is offering £25 cashback on your statement when you make 2 x £25 purchases as participating restaurants.

You need to register your card in advance at this site.  It seems that only Amex-issued cards are accepted, not MBNA or Lloyds cards.

The list of ‘participating restaurants’ is unfortunately nowhere to be found at that link but we can live in hope that it appears before the 3rd.  It may or not be the full list of all 400 restaurants participating in the festival.

I was a bit dismissive of this offer when it was first announced.  You won’t get much for £25 at any of the participating sites, even if you eat alone, so it will be £25 back on a far larger spend than £50!

However, the more I thought about, the more I thought that you can ‘play a game’ here:

If you and your partner each have an Amex card, you should both register for the offer and split your bill as long as each payment is over £25.

If you were very aggressive, you could ask to pay the bill over three or four cards, even for just two people.  (A cash tip may help here!).  Keep each payment over £25.

You could even ask to split the bill and then pay both bills with the same card!  That would trigger the £25 statement credit immediately.  However, if you do this I would make two unequal payments.  Amex may think it is an error if two identical charges are made on the same card within a minute of each other.

If you can find any participating restaurant that sells gift cards, this would also be an interesting option. 

 Any more ideas?