Shell Drivers Club is the loyalty scheme for Shell garages in the UK. Joining is simple – pick up a card at a Shell station when filling up and register it online. You earn 50 Avios just for registering your card so it is worth doing this even if you switch to a different reward later.
Shell has now launched a silly but fun promotion to earn bonus points: The Pump Challenge.
The person who devised this should be congratulated for appealing to the inner child in all of us.
This is how it works.
Next time you visit a Shell garage, you need to get your petrol or diesel bill to land on an EXACT amount of money, to the nearest penny. Manage it and you get a bonus. Miss it and you don’t.
Here are the bonuses available (remember that 2 Shell points = 1 Avios point):
£30.00 – 50 Shell points
£40.00 – 100 Shell points
£50.00 – 150 Shell points
£60.00 – 200 Shell points
£70.00 – 300 Shell points
£80.00 / £90.00 / £100.00 – 500 Shell points
The logic is interesting. Whilst some people may spend less than usual (if you tank only takes £45 of fuel you will stop at £40), some others will spend more. There will also be ‘breakage’ from people who fail to hit the target. Some people may miss one target and then decide to spend another £9.99 trying to hit the next one.
The bonus points are on top of the standard points. You earn 1 Shell point for every litre of petrol you buy, and 2 points = 1 Avios.
As well as Avios, 500 points can be turned into £2.50 of Shell vouchers or £2.50 of Waitrose vouchers. The benefit of taking Avios is that Shell converts (once a quarter) your points in multiples of 20 (ie 10 Avios) with no minimum, unlike the 500 point minimum for other rewards.
Of course, if you buy enough Shell fuel to get to 500 points on a regular basis, you will effectively be ‘paying’ 1p per Avios (since 500 points is worth 250 Avios or £2.50 in Shell or Waitrose vouchers). This is not necessarily a great deal.
The Pump Challenge runs until 22nd July so heavy drivers could do quite nicely out of it. More details can be found on the Shell website here.
(Want to earn more Avios? Click here to see our latest articles on earning and spending your points and click here to see our list of current Avios promotions.)
About Head for Points
This sketch from Not the Nine O’Clock News seems rather apt:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWIz4eYj3fE
A classic! Well remembered. 🙂
The Pay At Pumps have the ability to authorise a set spend on the card. Set this to the amount you want and you win every time!
Excellent
Someone try please!
Plus old Gold in their first year (maybe others?) currently earn 4x MR points per £1 @ Shell. (Must try my old BMI card!)
If you lucked out with £70 on the noddle (57 litres) you’d earn 280 MR points + [300 + 57] Shell points ie 458 MR points total.
Almost worth the inflated cost per litre that Shell charge 🙂
I guess it depends on where you are; I have 5 Shell garages in my vicinity, and they are actually the cheapest compared to Tesco, Asda and BP also in the vicinity!
I wish they were the same where I live. 5 or 6p more than Asda and Sainsburys, 3p more than Tesco.
Even with 20p off a litre fuel save. I had to top up my wife’s car yesterday and it really grated paying 117p/l for diesel 🙁
another excellent point. looks like you have to be a bit of a whiz on the pump then 🙂
oops reply intended to tims below
Remember that the 4x points on Gold card only appear if you pay for your fuel in the shop, so if you use pay-at-pump to take advantage of authorising set spend, you’ll only get 2x MR points for the transaction.
Don,t forget to load the app to your phone which gives regular bonus points
Does it? I haven’t had anything for two years. Prior to that I would easily double my tally with app points.
For the last few months I have had 100 bonus points offers on the app, with a minimum 10 litre spend, roughly once every week. I have no idea why but I am not complaining….
Have you by any chance changed your phone? When I changed mine I stopped receiving the push notification offers.
If you pick up a replacement card next time you are in the store and do the replacement in your account online. Then delete the app from your phone and reinstall it with the new card number and you should start receiving the offers again.
There appears to be different variations of the offer as well. Some require a min of 10/15/25 litres. There may be more but thats the ones I have seen.
Bit frustrating as I filled up with Shell last night to use my Amex offer. I decided to go to £51 just to make sure. Ah well, at least I got my £10.
I always do that with the amount of liters anyway, so changing to money won’t be a problem.
Great!
talking of shell i have £10 back off £50 on my amex which i need to use. not sure i can draw enough fuel. can i top this up with shell shop purchases to make the £50?
thinking of doing that with gold and then spending £40 with this promo
thoughts?
top up is fine
Personally I have switched to texaco for my night fills when tesco is unmanned. Texaco star rewards can be exchanged for virgin flying club miles at the rate of 1/1, ie double the normal shell/avios rate. The only problem being you can only change batches of 1000 (but shell only converts every quarter anyway so it’s no different for me)
I usually always try to end on a round number. But in my experience I find this isn’t always possible no matter how gentle on the leaver you are. eg. Fuel could go from 44.10lt to 44.11lt but cost could go from £51.99 to £52.01. I’ve put it down to the rounding off effect as fuel is above a pound a litre and is only measured to two decimal places – the same as pennies at some point there must be gaps in the cost.
I filled up with exactly £50.00 six times to get my Amex £10 off… if you’re worried then it’s just a matter of working all values out in advance, i.e. if it’s 117.9ppl, then you can get to all of the above values except £30
Nice to see this game bring promoted! I play this all the time (well, to the nearest full £ anyway) seeing as Amex only reward points for a full £. No point in spending £9.99 and getting 9 Amex points, when you can spend £10.00 and fget 10!
You mean 36 vs 40 MR for Shell purchases (or 27 vs 30 for Tesco fuel…)
heh heh 🙂
You made him feel bad now lol
I am pretty sure that Tesco gives you 20p per litre on part litres.
Only at the new “pay at pump” which take fuel save off BEFORE filling.
I have not received it in-store or the old style pay-at-pump.
I always pay in store, to use my tesco cc as a clubcard, and it always gives me 20p off a litre or part litre.
Do you get 4 x Mr points at tesco garages if you pay in the shop rathe than at the pump?
No, the 4x at Shell is a glitch in the system that could be corrected/stopped at any time. It should be 2x at Shell (base & travel points), regardless of where you pay for your fuel but for some reason it is coming out as 1x base point and 3x travel points if you pay in the shop.
Tesco is 3x as you get the base point, the travel point and the supermarket point.
If/when Amex do stop the shell glitch, history suggests that they won’t go back and historcially correct the points earned.
Just put in exactly £50 and got my Amex credit. Also got triple points on what was effectively a free car wash with the £10 off.
you must have a very delicate touch 🙂
Snot hard! Stop at 49.90 and then blip it through to 50.00. I remember the old NTNON sketch, too.
Anyone know the maths??
I fill a lorry up with 200 litres every day, sometimes more. Normally at tesco with the gold Amex, and tesco credit card as club card.
Would I be better off using shell for this promo?
Cheers
Can we assume your Gold Amex is now 1 point per £1?
And how good would you be at getting EXACTLY 190 litres or 200 litres?
Overages don’t count.
OK lots of £80 transactions 🙂
First year gold! So still 4 MR! The pump stops once you reach 100 litres so it will be exact.
good = 4x
but it has to be £80 on the noddle
£80.01 gets you no bonus
On reflection, given the difficulty of hitting EXACTLY £80/£90 every time, you’d be better off on the Amex @ 4x
Pretty nice MR from that I imagine! £200 litres a day at approx £230-£240 cost at the pump…..c.1000 MR points per day!
OT: Can Argos gift cards be used for online purchases as well as in store? And can they be used to purchase other gift cards?
Need to spend my £70 and Argos seems to be a well priced source of SodaStream syrups, but the flavours I want are only available for delivery, not in store. If I get an Argos gift card, I can spend the £70 now and order more drink as and when.
Answer definitely NO as of last year but you can see latest online. I checked it out LY and negative.
Thanks. Bit of a bugger. Why don’t companies realise we want to spend gift cards online?
You can spend your £70 by buying the NowTvs @ 9.99 and reselling them for a miniscule profit after post but you’ll get the credit
Too much like hard work, especially as I bought 3 at Christmas and I’m only just getting to the end of the first Entertainment pass.
Not that much hard work. I had £70 in Curry’s vouchers, £75 in Argos just sitting there unused (wasted). Turned it back into real money and turned a small profit for my trouble – all sold easily. Also liberated the new £10 Argos credit (though I didn’t actually buy anything as they had to refund me on the spot but Amex doesn’t see that) and when I was in town also bought £15 of M&S chickens to liberate that voucher plus found £600 of pay.coms in Tesco.
All in all a successful day.
Looking at the Shell website it says to the pound – not the penny – so £50.00 to £50.99 should trigger the bonus points.
needs testing
That’s not how the “practice” game on their website works. I managed to get spot on £50.00 today but £60 or more wouldn’t fit in my fuel tank!
Looks like not many people having being trying this….
They have changed the rules:
“We wanted to make sure that as many of our customers as possible could enjoy extra Shell Bonus Points when they played our Pump Challenge*.
We’ve now widened the bands where you get to earn points. So instead of having to land exactly on £30.00, say, you can pick up Bonus Points if you hit £29.50. Or if you go over and hit £30.50 you’ll still collect Bonus Points.”
Interesting. Was always a sackable promotion idea to have to land exactly on the x.00 point, which idiot suggested that?
I thought it was fun!