Maximise your Avios, air miles and hotel points

NEW: Get £120 of Deliveroo credit as an Amex Gold benefit

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American Express has launched a great new benefit for holders of the American Express Preferred Rewards Gold credit card.

You will receive £120 per annum of Deliveroo credit. This is a permanent card benefit, not a one-off promotion.

This makes a real difference, I think, to whether you keep Gold after the first free year. It also makes the card a no-brainer for regular Deliveroo users for the first year, when Gold is free.

How does the new Deliveroo benefit work?

Preferred Rewards Gold Cardmembers will receive 2 x £5 Deliveroo statement credits per calendar month, starting immediately.

You need to register for this benefit, but only once. After your initial registration, you will receive the 2 x £5 monthly Deliveroo credits without any further registration required.

Once registered, the £5 credits will be automatically applied to your account by American Express. You obviously need to make payment with your Preferred Rewards Gold card.

You can opt in to this new benefit via the ‘Offers’ tab of your online Amex statement page or in the American Express app.

Any small print?

Only one credit can be used per Deliveroo transaction so you cannot receive £10 back on one order.

If your order is below £5, the credit is capped at the size of the order.

The offer only applies to primary cards, not supplementary cards.

Credits do not roll over from month to month. If you don’t use your 2 x £5 credits in any particular month, they are lost.

New to Deliveroo? Save another £10

If you use my refer-a-friend link of https://roo.it/robertb-6×33 to register, you get 4 x £2.50 discount codes.

What is this benefit worth?

If you are a regular Deliveroo user, you should have no trouble getting the full £120 of value from this offer.

As Preferred Rewards Gold is free for your first year, and £140 per year thereafter, I think this makes a real difference to the maths of whether you keep the card beyond the free first year.

For occasional users, it clearly has less value. That said, a £5 credit may tempt you to use Deliveroo more often.

You can order groceries too

Remember that you can order top-up groceries via Deliveroo in many areas, from stores from Aldi to Waitrose. The £5 credit is valid against this.

Conclusion

We recommend the Gold Card as your ‘best first’ miles and points credit card. This is due to a combination of:

  • no annual fee in Year 1
  • a big sign-up bonus of 20,000 American Express Membership Rewards points, convertible into Avios but also into many non-travel rewards if you decide later that Avios or hotel points are not for you (conditions apply as to who qualifies for the bonus)
  • two free airport lounge passes each year, which gives you an early first experience of how miles and points can help you travel better, and

The new Deliveroo benefit, worth up to £120 per year of statement credits, is a valuable addition. If you regularly order food for delivery then you shouldn’t struggle to get full value from it, whilst other people may value the ability to get £5 discounts on top-up grocery shopping.

Added to the 20,000 Membership Rewards points sign-up bonus (if you qualify) and the two airport lounge passes, and you have an impressive package if you can make the most of it.

Don’t forget to opt in to the new Deliveroo benefit before placing your first order.

The American Express Preferred Rewards Gold application page is here if you are now tempted to sign up.

Disclaimer: Head for Points is a journalistic website. Nothing here should be construed as financial advice, and it is your own responsibility to ensure that any product is right for your circumstances. Recommendations are based primarily on the ability to earn miles and points. The site discusses products offered by lenders but is not a lender itself. Robert Burgess, trading as Head for Points, is regulated and authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority to act as an independent credit broker.

Comments (117)

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

  • DJ says:

    £5 is just barely to cover your service charge.

    The food price on the app is still hugely inflated comparing to when phoning the restaurants directly.

    • Yorkieflyer says:

      Aside from the immoral business model screwing both restaurants and ‘employees’

      • BJ says:

        It’s a difficult one, I am inclined to agree but at same time I’m sure many can make it work for them or they wouldn’t be doing it.

      • Rob says:

        Makes no sense. Whilst the fees are high, the mark-ups on restaurant food are so high that even 30% off the top doesn’t touch the sides. For restaurants constrained by seating capacity but not kitchen capacity, it is a good deal.

        Do you think Pizza Express is unhappy selling a £10 pizza for £7 to Deliveroo, which costs them £1 in ingredients?

        It’s such a good deal that some restaurants are closing and becoming ‘dark kitchens’, taking premises on an industrial estate for a fraction of their current rent and churning out the same food exclusively for delivery.

        The logistics are also impressive. My wife decided the other day that she wanted a steak for dinner (rest of us had eaten). We literally had a steak on the table from a restaurant around the corner within 15 minutes of her saying that.

        The risk is that Deliveroo goes the same way as Amazon has with MarketPlace- looking at which restaurants do well in a certain area, and then creating its own corporate-owned ‘dark kitchen’ in the same area to serve the same food at a lower price.

        • Jonathan says:

          You make it sound like the restaurant game is easy money! I think the stars (pre Covid) show that high street restaurants is a tough game to crack for big & small players. Rent & staffing costs are multiples of the raw ingredient costs (plus pizza is an extreme example).

          I get the dark kitchen model but that will only work in areas with a high population density, delivery (not prep) time needs to be less than 10-15 mins or the food will be a cold congealed mess regardless of packaging.

          • Rhys says:

            That’s true of normal restaurant delivery too, though.

            The appeal of dark kitchens is that you can plonk your kitchen on the cheapest land available and don’t need to have customer facing facilities. It can be in a garage for all anyone knows.

          • BuildBackBetter says:

            New models need to emerge. Cannot cling on to the expensive restaurant model. Not everyone wants to go out for dinner.
            Also not everyone wants to spend £5 for a glass of wine.

          • Rob says:

            I would recommend that you DO spend £5 per glass at home (ie £20 per bottle) and drink the cheap stuff in restaurants. This is what most wine experts seem to do. The 300% mark-up on restaurant wine makes drinking decent stuff there too expensive.

        • john says:

          If your paying £10 for your pizza express pizza, you aren’t doing it right. They are the king of offers and have been for many years. They always have some kind of discount deal on you can get direct from them or through someone else. O2 Priority was good for it for a long time. The only time I did it wrong was when we went on a christmas bank holiday and somehow there weren’t any offers!

      • cinereus says:

        Unfortunately lots of people here don’t care about the morality aspect. And are happy if all innovative independents die to be replaced by infinite Zizzi/Five Guys/Leon/etc.

        • Rob says:

          This is totally ludicrous. Deliveroo makes it INCREDIBLY easy to start an independent restaurant, easier than ever. Do you now need a huge High Street site, a long expensive lease and all the alcohol licensing issues, staffing issues etc? No. You can hire the crappiest bit of space you can find on the cheapest industrial estate you can find, paying virtually nothing, and start selling your food via the app. You could be in business within a couple of weeks. If it goes well, you have the confidence, reputation and customer base to get a ‘real’ site – although more dark kitchens may be more profitable. If it goes wrong, you’ve lost virtually nothing.

          The reason that Five Guys etc dominate is that landlords HATE giving sites to independent restaurants who can’t offer then financial certainty. It’s the fault of the property market not the restaurant market. What landlord wouldn’t prefer Pret or Costa to some guy wanting to start an independent cafe with no budget?

          The inability of people to understand business economics is shocking. If someone came to me and offered to sell ad space on HfP in return for a 30% commission and ‘no sale, no fee’ I would bite their hand off.

          • lumma says:

            The problem were Rob is that when people dream of opening their own restaurant, no one is dreaming about working in a windowless box under a railway arch with no human interaction other than men wearing motorcycle helmets.

          • Rob says:

            If you want to start a restaurant without putting your life savings and possibly house on the line, you’d do it.

            There are huge sums of money to be made in setting up a ‘dark kitchen’ only restaurant chain, I think. Does your local family Italian have the capital to open another 10 sites? Of course not. Do they have the capital to open 10 dark kitchens? Yes.

          • Jonathan says:

            You’re assuming that everyone who opens a restaurant wants to make millions from it! Fortunately most small restauranteurs do it as they’re passionate about food and people not slaving away on an industrial estate and seeing how few olives they can put in a salad whilst still charging £10 for it.

            One of the biggest revelations to me after leaving London was that there are thousands of small business owners in this country pursuing a passion in return for a reasonable living as they can afford the rent/rates.

            Artisan bakers who make Gail’s look like mass produced cardboard, fishmongers who actually know the guys catching the fish, chefs who grow/pick their own produce and change the menu depending on what’s good that day. And a 6 bed house for the price of my 2 bed flat in NW6.

            (Only about 15 miles from where you grew up as well Rob ;-0)

    • BuildBackBetter says:

      Yes, but you can enjoy a bottle of wine for £5 instead of paying the same for a glass at the restaurant.

      • AndyW says:

        I can also watch the six nations on the telly rather than going to twickenham, but the two things just are not comparable. Each to their own, but dining out is not the same is sitting in with a takeaway on your lap.

        • BuildBackBetter says:

          Do you go to twickenham every week? How is that comparable?
          Families don’t mind one delivery a week though!

          • Rob says:

            There is someone who lives above us who orders individual a cup of coffee for delivery. Very bizarre. Perhaps we see more of this to use up the £5 credits!

          • Optimus Prime says:

            There was an American actress who paid $10 to have Deliveroo bringing her just a banana…

          • Lady London says:

            Rob how do you know this is what they’re ordering? is there something special about the coffee?

          • Rob says:

            The delivery guy rings our doorbell occasionally when they don’t read the signs properly ….

      • Jonathan says:

        The £5 glass of wine (plus the £3.50 olives etc) is the profit though. Talk to any restauranteur (ignore Michelin * types) & they’ll tell you they don’t make any profit from the headline dish eg. the pizza or steak it’s all from the add ons which most people end up going for whether they intended to or not.

        Take away loses the costs of waiting staff & large premises but also loses the additional income streams so the £7 pizza (after Deliveroo’s cut) becomes marginal at best.

        Factor in lack of tips so your chef in a dark kitchen/takeaway expects a higher basic wage plus the shortage of qualified staff after huge numbers of European staff left due to Brexit/Covid & you’d be a brave/foolish person to think you can make money relying on Deliveroo/Uber Eats!

        • BuildBackBetter says:

          You’re supporting the argument why dining out is expensive!
          People compare food prices and complain but forget the ridiculous prices of alcohol at restaurants!

      • Economist_Nearby says:

        You can drink a bottle of wine for £5, but you wont enjoy it!

        • Lady London says:

          Yes. Much less profit, quite often, at the top of a wine list than at the bottom.

        • Rob says:

          £5 bottle of wine split c/o Decanter

          Retailer margin: £1.07
          Excise duty (to Govt): £2.23
          VAT (to Govt): 83p
          Packaging: 36p
          Delivery to retailer: 20p
          MONEY PAID FOR THE BASE WINE TO PRODUCER: 31p

          On a £10 bottle, the money paid to the producer is £2.70 …

  • Freddy says:

    Not getting excited about £5 off each order, only useful if you are a great fan and already use it twice a month. It’ll probably be costing amex next to nothing as deliveroo know it will entice people onto their platform.

    Is this really the best they can do? They could have done netflix credits, even the Dell computer benefit which is on the biz gold card or £10 off a grocery shop per month would have had more widespread appeal.

    • BuildBackBetter says:

      Really? How many people buy dell products regularly, that too direct from dell?
      These offers are from merchants, if Netflix doesn’t want to provide discounts, you can’t do much. Make use of Morrison’s 10% off.

    • TGLoyalty says:

      Are you complaining for the sake of it?

      I’m very happy with Deliveroo credit. I have no use at all for Dell credit.

      • Rob says:

        The Dell credit is VERY useless, because Dell doesn’t sell consumables such as printer ink. I did replace my scruffy old laptop bag this time around but I will be struggling come 1st July when I have another £75.

        Very likely I will buy random stuff, get 110% repaid due to the stacking of the two Dell offers and give it to charity.

        • TGLoyalty says:

          Exactly. Complaining about credit for somewhere that sells something you could potentially consume twice out of your c90 meals a month vs a useless dell credit.

          It’s not even as if they have replaced a current benefit or put the card fee up

      • cinereus says:

        Dell credit you can resell or give away.

    • J says:

      ‘It’ll probably be costing amex next to nothing’ – that’s what I want Amex to do, gather lots of paid for promotions at zero cost. If they we’re subsidising credits, it would be better to reduce the annual fee instead.

  • Dominic says:

    Good offer for Amex; will help gain more typical ‘lifestyle’ customers, rather than those hunting purely for miles.

    Sounds like a cheapish dinner to me after a late night working in the city, if nothing else.

    • BuildBackBetter says:

      +100! Given the increasing work from home, going to restaurants will become rarer as people work at different times. A food delivery works better!

  • Matty says:

    I get some decent offers from Uber Eats. Regularly get 50% off on one of our accounts. Their delivery fees don’t seem as high and I find Deliveroo inflate their prices – be that pizza or groceries.

    • BuildBackBetter says:

      I like Uber eats. Usually tip £1 while placing order and food is still hot when I receive it, compared to Deliveroo.

    • Dominic says:

      Odd, I find Uber Eats service and delivery fees insanely expensive.

      • TGLoyalty says:

        Was going to say as soon as they added the 10% service fee it became a waste of time.

        In most cases after the 25% off code its the same total price as it is when you’re on Deliveroo plus.

      • Red Flyer says:

        I live out of reach of Deliveroo but find that when getting off my ar$e and cooking myself the food costs less AND is warmer when it reaches the table!

    • john says:

      Deliveroo are constantly offering me £7 credit to order. I don’t live in their area anymore.

  • Harry T says:

    It’s interesting that I have this offer on my gold charge card but not my gold credit!

  • Graham Walsh says:

    Amex Plat is due for renewal this month. Can’t see a reason to keep it at the moment. Still not travelling anywhere.

    • Sandgrounder says:

      Have you had a retention bonus? Mine is up this month, I have been told to call back a bit later in the month when it is a full 12 months since my last one.

      • G says:

        12 month rule is bull. I’ve had 2 retention bonuses around 5 months apart on plat

        • Sandgrounder says:

          I have heard the 12 month rule doesn’t exist from others, but it may depend on your profile, and to be fair I didn’t push too hard on quitting this time. If I don’t get offered at least 20k I will probably refer the Mrs with my last 24k slot and then close mine down. I was advised that new travel offers will be coming soon related to the countries on the green list when it is announced, once again may have had an agent who tells porkies, not sure how that would work.

      • Graham Walsh says:

        Yes, had a load of points last year, then some of the offers. Marriott was good timing for other half’s birthday. Will call them and see what they have to offer. Might be the same as last year. Here’s some points, we’ve got offers coming?

    • Harry T says:

      There is not really a good reason to hold the Amex plat right now. I’m getting the same or better offers on Gold cards!

  • Rob says:

    The rules are totally different for BAPP and Platinum Charge, as we explain here (which is linked to from our top menu and appears on the home page every day!) – https://www.headforpoints.com/2020/12/28/what-amex-sign-up-bonuses-are-you-still-eligible-for/

    • Rob says:

      Nothing has changed, but the call centre haven’t a clue.

      To be fair, given the complexity of the rules, you can’t blame them.

      First rule of HfP is that you never believe a call centre if it conflicts with what you read on here.

      • Sundar says:

        And second rule of HfP is Read HfP First and ask the experts here 🙂

  • Dave says:

    So as they bit by bit devalue the Plat card they’re improving the gold. Seems a slightly strange strategy!

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