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£25 Amex cashback with the London Restaurant Festival – and how to maximise it

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The London Restaurant Festival is back, running from October 8th to October 27th.

American Express 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.

You might think that you won’t get much for £25 at any of the participating restaurants – although a few pubs seem to be included, and I am pretty sure that Amex won’t know the difference between food and beer spend.

If you want to take full advantage of it, this is probably the best way to approach it:

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.

Gift vouchers are another potential opportunity.  D&D, the ex-Conran restaurant group, sells vouchers in its outlets.  They even do £25 vouchers!  You could purchase a number of £25 vouchers in separate transactions (two per Amex card) and then use them in one go for a half-price meal.  If you being really tight / smart, you could wait until the Evening Standard £15-£25 D&D meal promotion comes around again and spend the vouchers then.


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Comments (33)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • Andrew S says:

    “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!).”

    Raffles – you have clearly been out of the North for too long! You should try organising our team lunch/dinenrs. We are usually there for at least 10 minutes whilst the server run’s all the cards. Fairly usual i would say.

  • Nick says:

    Does this offer apply to supplementary cards too? In the past others seem to have made it work, but I was unable to.

    • flood says:

      I think (happy to be corrected if I’m wrong) that Amex-issued supplementary cards are OK but MBNA and Lloyds supplementary are not

      • Andrew says:

        This is right – the card numbers need to be different in order to register a supplementary card.

  • AndyGWP says:

    I’ve had a “PREMIER INN – Spend £100 or more and get £20 back” – don’t know if its targeted but could be worth people looking out for 🙂

    • Rob says:

      If it was properly targeted I doubt it would have gone to Platinum card holders, which it has 🙂

      • Dan says:

        I’ve also had a Ryanair offer £10 back when you make a booking, although doesn’t seem to mention a minimum spend. Some potentially good deals such as leeds to dublin – currently on sale for £9.99 – making you 1 pence profit?!

        • Rob says:

          That would work OK, definitely. There was no minimum spend for the Ryanair offer.

      • gnarlyoldgoatdude says:

        I think I know what you’re getting at, but “low cost” options such as Ryanair and Premier Inn can still be surprisingly expensive. Every little helps.

  • Steve M says:

    Registered last week. Went to London for the weekend. Spent about £30 each in 2 x locations – Tiger, Tiger & 5th Floor Waterstones – and by Saturday evening had an email from Amex confirming they would credit my account with £25. Great fun and worth it!

  • Andrew (@andrewseftel) says:

    I’d suggest Outlaw’s and Ametsa out of the festival menus, but I’m actually going to pick Outlaw’s and then Pied a Terre for its standard lunch menu.

  • pazza2000 says:

    I would be confident that 2 transactions in the same restaurant, even just minutes apart, will earn the statement credit. However for the purpose of playing it safe I would perhaps put forward two slightly different amounts. What D&D restaurants are taking part?

  • Nick says:

    Tracking is super quick – you get a pretty much instantaneous email both for the first and second purchase, and this was with a Lloyds and MBNA Diamond Club card

    I would highly recommend going to more than one restaurant though, that’s the point of the festival, to try new places! So far I’ve been to Picture and Foxlow, and they’ve both been excellent.

  • AndrewM says:

    Despite what the website quoted says, I went into 4 D&D restaurants and 3 of them said they never sell gift cards, and the last one says they have sold out….

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