American Express has partnered with Chili’s to allow cardholders with a Membership Rewards earning card to use those points to pay for their tab. Here is how the program works:
- Swipe your eligible American Express Card at the Ziosk tablet located on your Chili’s table.
- You will be presented an option on the payment screen to redeem points. You must press the button on the payment terminal to indicate “yes.” You’ll see the option to use points along with the number of points you’ll need to use.
- Press the blue button to use points for your order.
Start today all company owned Chili’s restaurants will allow you to pay with Membership Rewards points and the remaining participating franchise restaurants will join the program throughout the year. This similar to their partnership with McDonald’s that also allows cardholders to pay with Membership Rewards points. Presumably you’ll receive 1¢ per point in value as well.
For most people this will be a terrible value for their points, you should be able to get far more value out of transferring to one of their travel partners. This could be useful for those who are happy to just receive 1¢ per point but given that you can buy Chili’s gift cards for less than 90% of face value, you’re actually getting less than 0.9¢. I think you’d have to be crazy to use your points for this.
The only real way I could see this being useful is if you get more than 1¢ per point and I find that highly unlikely given that’s the rate you get with McDonald’s.
