Shell Drivers Club is a partner with both avios.com and British Airways Executive Club. In December, they are giving away 72 million Avios points in a major competition.
First, a quick reminder of how Shell Drivers Club works. It is a simple system. You earn 1 Shell Drivers Club point for every litre of basic fuel you buy and 2 points per litre of V-Power premium fuel. When you have collected 500 points, you can exchange them for:
250 Avios points (see the BA website for the official details, scroll down)
£2.50 Waitrose voucher
£2.50 Shell voucher
It is worth noting that, because of the relatively poor conversion rate, you may want to take the Waitrose or Shell vouchers instead. You are effectively ‘buying’ Avios points for 1p by taking the miles option, and that is not the cheapest of prices.
The only advantage of taking Avios is that it is a better deal for small spenders. If you set up auto-convert, you only need as few as 20 Shell points to qualify to receive Avios (in this case, 10 Avios) at the end of each quarter. You need to buy 500 litres of fuel to get enough points for a Waitrose voucher!
Shell has launched a big competition for Christmas
Every day until Christmas Eve, Shell is giving away 1 million Avios points to THREE people. This means that 72 people are going to become Avios millionaires!
Entering is a little tricky. You need to visit a Shell garage and pay for your fuel with Paypal via the Shell Motorist app on your smartphone. This instantly knocks out people without a smartphone or who live in rural areas with poor mobile reception!
The minimum purchase is £20.
I have never tried this app, but it apparently allows you to pay without having to visit the cashier. This could be a handy time saver and will cut down on random junk food purchases in the shop as well!
You can find out more on the Shell Drivers Club website here. Good luck – it would be fantastic if a Head for Points reader was a winner!
(Want to earn more Avios? Click here to visit our home page for the latest articles on earning and spending your Avios points and click here to see how to earn more Avios from current offers and promotions.)
About Head for Points
Personally my experience of using the app has been simple, quick and easy. I don’t find that I have to wait long for the authorisation, and I have usually filled up and driven off while others are still standing in the queue. I appreciate others have different experiences of using it, but it’s made my life easier. For me, Shell is the garage of choice as locally they are the cheapest, and also en route between work and home, so I don’t have to think twice about it.
There is also a staggered bonus points promotion running in December where you get bonus points every time you fill up during the month, >£30, and the more times you fill up, the higher the bonus, starting from 125 points.
Without the bonuses, I will agree that there are probably better places to collect points/miles on fuel, but the abundance of bonuses handed out by Shell on a weekly basis, put them at the top for me. Not the same for everyone, I appreciate that.
Some very back of envelope maths:
Average UK petrol and diesel consumption daily :120 million litres
Assuming a 40l fill thats 3 million fills per day
shell has 13% of the market = 390,000 fills per day
Now:
1. Not all shell stations offer fill and go (assume 66% do)
2. Most users don’t use fill and go (assume 5% do)
390k x .66 x.05 = 12,870 fill and go’s per day.
Chance of winning = 3/12870 or approx 1 in 4000.
The market share and daily fuel is accurate. Ave fill is a guestimate. the bottom 2 are plucked from my experience of shell near me and how few people seem to use fill and go when I’m there.
If you played every day thats 24/4000 or about 1/166. The price for playing – whatever the difference between your cheapest fuel source and shell is, which assuming 20 litres per day cant be more than 5p per litre = £1 per day, £24 to enter. Statistically you’d need to spend £4000 in additional fuel charges in order to win. So the cost for 1 million avios is £4000 in this case.
By coincidence, that’s pretty much the same as the tesco clubcard conversion rate!
Not sure how you get a million avios for £4000 spend at Tescos. If that were the case, most families would be flying all over the place on avios fares.
He’s not saying £4000 of spend.
He’s referring to £4000 in value of clubcard points (ie 400,000 clubcard points).
Yes, £4000 of clubcard tokens is 960,000 avios with conversion at £2.50->600 avios.
My app worked on the first day. Missing authorise the payment!
That maths might have estimated fill and go usage far too generously. It seems the transaction ID’s you get on the fill and go receipt are actually sequential.
I filled up on Wenesday at 7pm, then again on Sunday at 7pm. My Sunday Transaction was 17 numbers higher than my Wednesday indicating 17 fill and go’s in 4 days, so average = 4 per day.
My shell is on a busy road, albeit in an average town so it’s probably fairly representative. 1000 shell stations around the country, not all on fill and go (assume 66%) so daily fill and go’s by this estimate are 666 x 4 = 2664, giving a 3/2664 or 1 in 888 chance of winning, or 1 in 37 if you enter every single day! That’s jolly good odds.
Grrrr…Northern Ireland is excluded (I’m not even sure that there are any shell stations here).
Well I tried this twice. The first time £20 worked and the second time it stopped on it’s own accord at £19.72 instead of £20. Obviously I didn’t qualify for the promotion no matter what I tried.
My general thoughts are the app was a faff for me to download as it didn’t recognise my existing shell account, I uninstalled it three time before It decided to work. Neither of the petrol pumps recognised the QR code, typing the code in was fine.
I did notice like the poster above that 50 points had been added to my card for each visits. However with the lack of accuracy at hitting £20, and the lack of choosing the credit card in paypal means I shall make way for the rest of you to persevere 🙂 good luck
With regards to choosing the Carr you pay with, you need to log into PayPal (the app is easiest) go to settings then there is an in store payment option – change that to your desired card.
I always pay with the Jimmy Carr – it’s wonderfully tax efficient 😉
I have really gone out of my way to enter this competition but every time I actually find a station that you can use it at and fill up, it stops at just under £20 even though its been authorised for £20. Its really annoying as it stops at £19.80 or £19.60. A complete waste of time so far and quite a bit of effort involved a well. Ive emailed them but you usually wait about 5 days for a reply so will keep you posted.
Another data point.
The Shell receipts are sequential for fill and go (well as in my local allocated fill and go receipts sequentially for its own store)
In a 7 day period my local shell had 34 fill and go’s, and 11 of them were due to a friend and myself targeting this offer so either every store has some HfP’ers doing this and is averaging 34 fills per week, or we are distorting the data and an average would be 23 fills per week. Assuming 666 stores:
1. 34 x 666 = 22,644 fill and go’s per week, ave 3234 per day (1 in 1078 chance of winning, 1 in 45 if you play every day)
2. 23 x 666 = 15,318, ave 2188 per day (1 in 729 chance of winning, 1 in 30 if you play everyday)
I also took the liberty of emailing them to confirm that the £20 is inclusive of VAT, which it is as this was not clear in the T&C. So as long as the pump shows £20 or more, your all good.
I hope you win
Very cheesed of that despite my app authorising me to start filling, there was apparently a problem with the pump. I ended up having to pay in store.. was told to ring customer services – been on phone over half an hour to be told about ‘get out clause n umber 21’ in the Ts and Cs which says Shell is not liable for any technical errors. Grrrrrr…