🌮 Earn 7x points on dining

Plus, this card is celebrating its 10th birthday

Author

Mike Dodge
September 18, 2026

Estimated read time: 4 minutes and 30 seconds

🍔 TRENDING TRAVEL NEWS 🍔

• Foodie Stays: These are the 25 best hotel restaurants to dine at in the world.

• Dine and Dash: The lounge food trend that’s perfect for tight layovers.

• Sponsored by Factor: Dinner should be real food without being real hard — get the convenience of fresh, ready-to-eat meals delivered without compromise.

• Easy Peasy: If you don’t want to mess with spending categories, this card (and its elevated offer) is your new best friend — it earns 2x miles on all purchases.

Hey there! Welcome back to your favorite morning newsletter.

I’ve been back in Toronto for a couple of weeks now… and if there’s one thing I love about Toronto, it’s the food.

So today, let me tell you about how fellow food lovers can earn a crap load of points back on dining and groceries.

Let’s get started:

🌮 Earn 7x UR points on dining

There’s a credit card out there that I think everyone should have in their wallets…

The reason is that every few months, it offers a way to earn more points on certain categories than any other competitors.

And it doesn’t even have an annual fee.

I’m talking about this card, which offers 5% cash back on a series of quarterly rotating categories (on up to $1,500 in combined purchases).

In Q4 (October through December), those categories are:

  • Dining

  • Groceries (excluding Walmart and Target)

  • Donations to American Red Cross

You need to activate this offer, which you can do by December 14.

Now, 5% is solid… but here’s where it gets even better:

The same card normally earns 3% on dining (2% bonus on top of the 1% on all spend).

With this 5% promo (which is a 4% “bonus”), you can earn a grand total of 7% cash back on dining. Which is a LOT.

You can turn that cash back into points

If you hold any card that earns UR points, you can turn the cash back I just told you about into points instead.

That means you can earn 7x UR points per dollar on up to $1,500 of spending between October and the end of the year. 🤯

10,500 points is enough to do all kinds of cool things. You could transfer them to Hyatt and book free nights at a property like this one:

You could also transfer them to Flying Blue and book two short-haul Delta flights for 5,000 points each:

Even if not all of that $1,500 is spent on dining, earning 5x on groceries is still great.

And that, my friends, is why I think everyone should have this card.

It costs you nothing, but could earn you some free flights and hotels without a large amount of spending.

💳 Enter to win 5.5 million points

This premium travel card just turned 10, and it's celebrating by giving away 10 million points (happy birthday, by the way 🥳).

The catch is that 5.5 million of them go to one person. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Let me explain…

The contest

To enter to win those points, you post about your favorite trip since 2016. Ten finalists go to a public vote, and the winner gets 5.5 million points while the other nine get 500,000 each.

You can find all of the details on this page, and entry is open until November 6.

The offers everyone can use

If you had the card as of September 16, you can also activate these one-time offers to earn cash back on various travel:

  • $200 back on $200 with JSX, which is basically a free semi-private flight if you find a route that fits

  • $125 back on $500 at U.S. IHG hotels (which ends October 16 😬)

  • $125 back on $500 with SIXT car rental

  • $250 back on $1,000 at U.S. Miraval and Alila properties

  • $350 back on $1,500 with Wander

Everything except IHG runs through December 14.

Even though this is a perk for holders of this card, DON’T book any of those through the bank’s portal. Just activate the offers and book directly with the merchants in question.

A better DoorDash credit

Starting October 1, the card’s monthly $5 DoorDash credit — the one you can use on any qualifying DoorDash order — is increasing by $10. (The two monthly $10 non-restaurant order credits are staying the same.) That’s an extra $120 in annual benefits… if you’ll use it, of course.

No catch, just a nice value increase. We love to see it.

In summary, if you have this card, go activate the offers that fit your plans.

And if you don't, you might be realizing by now that the annual fee can pay for itself with all of the perks and credits the card offers. 🤷🏼‍♂️

And I hope this goes without saying…

…but if you earn any of those 10 million points, I’m available anytime for my free trip. Just sayin.

PRESENTED BY FACTOR

🥘 Why I keep buying my family Factor gift cards

My son (April here 👋) spent last summer three hours from home as a student director at a marching band camp. One of the band moms up there fed the student teachers after evening practice, and what she handed them was Factor. He came home talking about it the way most twenty-one-year-olds talk about a concert.

I wasn’t really surprised… a healthy meal that he doesn’t have to cook? Of course he loved it.

Then I actually looked at what he'd been eating. Factor is a ready-to-eat meal delivery service, so the meals show up fresh, never frozen, and go from fridge to dinner in a couple of minutes.

What won him over, and eventually me, is that he can read the ingredient list on any meal and recognize everything on it. Real food, chosen on purpose, with a rotating menu of more than a hundred options a week.

He's a senior now, juggling apartment life, marching band, and a schedule that leaves no room for a grocery run, much less cooking.

So for his birthday and again at Christmas, he gets a Factor gift card. It's becoming something of a special occasion tradition for us, and he uses every dollar of it before the semester's out.

Try Factor for yourself — or gift it to a loved one — and get 50% off your first box + Free Greens* when you use the code DAILY50FG at checkout.

*One free 3-pack Daily Greens per box with active subscription while supplies last until 09/27/2026.

💳 Current Transfer Bonuses 💳

And that does it for this week, my friends! I hope you enjoyed this week of content, and I look forward to seeing you again bright and early on Monday.

Byeeeeeee

With contributions by Sam Anthony, Katie Begnoche, and April Wilson.

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