If you're the kind of traveller who books a restaurant reservation for every night of a trip, there's a quiet little rewards hack worth knowing: OpenTable Regulars, the free loyalty programme attached to the OpenTable booking platform. It covers more than 70,000 restaurants across the US, Canada, Mexico, Australia, the UK, Ireland and Germany, and you earn points simply for making and completing reservations.
The baseline is 100 points per completed booking, but some time slots carry bonus awards of 500, 750 or even 1,000 points. Filter by 'Bonus points' in the app to find them. Those points convert into dining credits: at 1,000 points you get an $8 experience credit, and at 2,000, 5,000 or 10,000 points you can take $16, $40 or $80 off a meal — worth 0.8 cents per point. Cash out for an Amazon gift card instead and you'll only get 0.5 cents per point, so dining credits are the smarter play.
A couple of practical quirks. Some restaurants require a credit card to hold the booking and will charge you for late cancellations, usually within 24 hours, so read the terms. Dining credits expire 12 months after redemption, and once activated by attaching them to a reservation, you have 12 months to use them. Oddly, the credit becomes a digital gift card tied to your specific reservation — you have to show it to your server yourself; it doesn't apply automatically.
The real value comes from stacking. Points earned via OpenTable sit on top of whatever your credit card pays at restaurants — for example, a card earning 4x on dining worldwide still earns in full on the same meal. Frequent visitors to the US can go further: the Chase Sapphire Reserve offers up to $300 a year in statement credits at select high-end OpenTable restaurants, which you can combine with Regulars points on the very same dinner.
There's a cleverer trick, too. Many hotel restaurants are listed on OpenTable, so if your room rate or hotel status includes free breakfast, booking the hotel restaurant through the app can earn you points on a meal you're not paying for. One writer scored 750 points per morning on a comped breakfast at a Ritz-Carlton steakhouse — roughly $12 in future dining credits for bookings that cost nothing.
For holidaymakers, this is low-effort, zero-cost value. You're booking tables anyway; doing it through OpenTable means each one puts around 80 cents toward a future meal, more during bonus-point slots. Points post only after you actually show up, and availability and redemption options vary by country — outside the US, conversions apply to the local currency. If your trips lean toward food-focused cities like New York, London or Sydney, it's an easy habit to pick up: download the app, create an account with your email or phone number, and start stacking on your next dinner out.
