Potential £5 or £10 of LNER Perks credit for checking the LNER app
LNER Perks, the loyalty scheme for the East Coast rail franchise, is five years old.
I think it’s fair to say that LNER has done a decent job with it – or at least as good a job as you can do when your reward is just 2% of what you spend and you have to spend it on future train trips.
The occasional bit of gamification makes it more interesting – and this is one of those occasions.
In theory, it’s simple.
Go into the LNER app and you will see this:
Click it and your birthday reward will be unveiled. You will receive either £10 Perks credit, £5 Perks credit or multiple entries into a competition.
If you win Perks credit, you will receive it within 72 hours. It must be spent by 26th July or it will be removed from your account. Remember that Perks credit can only be spent on Advance tickets on LNER train services.
People who get Perks credit can ALSO get one entry into the competition. A tile will appear in the app which you need to click. This gets you one entry vs the 5 or 10 entries that other people will get who don’t win Perks credit.
The offer ends on 31st May.
You can stop reading here if you like!
If you really want to read on ….
For those who are interested in the small print of these offers, the T&C are fascinating. It explains exactly how the winners are chosen.
Basically, in order to enter you must have had a transaction with LNER in the last three years and have joined LNER Perks before 10th April.
Your odds of winning are based on how much Perks credit you had on 10th April:
Got £0?
- You have a 5% chance of getting £5 and a 95% chance of getting competition entries
Got 1p to £4.99?
- You have a 30% chance of getting £5 and a 70% chance of getting competition entries
Got exactly £5? (£5 is the sign-up bonus)
- You have a 10% chance of getting £5 and a 90% chance of getting competition entries
Got £5.01 to £15?
- You have a 50% chance of getting £5 and a 50% chance of getting competition entries
Got £15+?
- You have a 25% chance of getting £10 and a 75% chance of getting competition entries
Anyone who has not made a transaction in the last three years gets competition entries.
What’s interesting is that the numbers above are based on your CURRENT level of Perks credit (as of 10th April) and not your lifetime earnings. This makes it a slightly random way of deciding how worthy you are of winning a prize.
For example, I was sitting on £50+ of LNER Perks credit for almost a year. It seemed a waste to use it whilst LNER was running generous cashback deals with American Express. When those offers ended I blew my balance and now have just £5.21. This was actually a good amount to have since I had a 50/50 chance of winning £5, which I did.
However, if I hadn’t blown my balance, I would only have had a 25% chance of winning Perks credit. If I’d not been in Yorkshire over Easter, I would have been under £5 and only had a 10% chance.
LNER just seems to have made life complex for themselves here – especially as the credit needs to be spend within 10 weeks anyway. Giving everyone £5 – or at least giving everyone who has taken a recent trip £5 – seems more like it.
Thanks to Simon for flagging in our comments.