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
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!