Lazy Hacks for More Rewards

Tl;dr: These are our favorite “set it and forget it” and one-click hacks to earn more points on the spending you already do.

We’re doing a little blog housekeeping to kick off the new year! 🧹

Now, all in one place: all our favorite lazy tips to maximize points with minimal effort. We’ll update this page as programs change, so you can find these lazy hacks all in one place.

We group these into two categories:

Set and forget: link your credit card or loyalty program, and you’ll automatically get bonus rewards, no future thought necessary.

One-click: You’ll have to take a simple step such as booking through a portal, but you’ll receive extra points, miles, or cash back for that effort. 

Set and Forget Hacks

Eating out

Get extra cash back or loyalty rewards for dining and other purchases by registering with dining programs. You can seek out affiliated restaurants or just wait and see if you happen to stop in at one. Note that many offer bonus points if you dine with an affiliated restaurant and spend a certain amount shortly after signing up (usually around $30), so you might want to see if you can take advantage of the bonus. I recommend starting with Rakuten Dining (easy 5% cash back), but if you find yourself getting rewards often, you might want to switch to an airline or hotel program (they often offer higher rewards after 11 qualifying dines each year). 

Fuel up

Link your credit cards with Shell Fuel Rewards for seamless fuel discounts or American Airlines AAdvantage miles when filling up at Shell. 

Get extra points at Walgreens

Even if you don’t have a Bilt card, you can join Bilt Rewards and link your credit cards for points at Walgreens. (And restaurants, if you opt into Bilt’s dining program.)

Get more out of your rideshare and airport experience

Add a partner account (Bilt, Alaska, or Hilton) to your Lyft account to earn extra points or miles on your rides. Connect your Uber account to Marriott or Delta for bonus rewards on certain qualifying activities.

Join ThanksAgain and link your cards to earn rewards at partner merchants, including Lyft and hundreds of airport shops and restaurants.

Make your coffee more valuable

Link your Delta and Starbucks accounts to earn SkyMiles on $25+ Starbucks reloads. Connect your Starbucks account to Marriott for some occasional extra stars or points.

One-Click Hacks

Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate or referral links. LazyPoints may earn a small commission if you purchase through the links below—at no extra cost to you. Thanks for supporting the site!

Boost rewards with shopping portals 

Shopping portals offer points, miles, or cash back to consumers who use the portals to make purchases. The company gets a sale, the consumer gets a bonus, and the portal gets a cut. Many retailers offer rewards through shopping portals, as do a variety of other merchants, especially hotel chains. 

Rakuten is our favorite for this, and you can often get $40 back on your first $40+ purchase (we have seen it as high as $50 on a $50 purchase), including through our referral link. When Rakuten doesn’t have a hot offer, I recommend that people wait for that offer and start with something like Swagbucks (referral link here). Airline portals can help you earn more miles and, in some cases, make progress toward status (especially with AA). 

Many portals have browser extensions to save you a trip to their homepage, and can alert you when there are bonus rewards available. 

In addition to the shopping portals above, you can book your hotels via Rove. Rove offers its own “miles” (often quite a lot) for bookings while still allowing you to receive points and status benefits from the chain you book with—a great option if you don’t have a co-branded credit card for the hotel you’re staying with. You can get started with Rove with our referral link (Rove has offered as many as 1,500 points for signing up, so you might want to wait for that).

If you’re willing to go the extra mile and make a second click, you can check Cashback Monitor or another aggregator to see which portal offers the most rewards with a given merchant at the time you’re shopping (reward rates change often; be on the lookout for holiday sales!). 

Use credit card merchant offers

With merchant offers, companies will offer incentives via your credit card. You’ll have to find the offers in your credit card app and click to activate them, although some apps offer to do this for you. You can also get similar deals by activating offers from SimplyMiles on any linked Mastercard, or activating in-store offers and using a card linked to Rakuten. 

Before a major airfare purchase or hotel booking, I recommend checking your merchant offers, as you can sometimes get major discounts. Some of these are irrational and wonderful. I recently got $60 off a Hilton stay for using my Hilton credit card (that I was going to use anyway). Card-linked offers and SimplyMiles offers can stack, too, so I once got both cash back and AA miles by using my IHG Premier to book a Holiday Inn. 

Get miles on your short-term rentals

The combination of hotel loyalty program, shopping portal, and merchant offer rewards can sometimes make direct hotel bookings tough to beat. But sometimes short-term rentals are the way to go. When that’s the case, you can earn airline miles when booking Airbnb or Vrbo stays through certain airline-linked portals.  

Lazy take 🦥

You could set up all these hacks in a single day: link your accounts and bookmark a few sites. That effort (I know it’s a lot!) could pay off in a bunch of extra award travel in the years to come. That’s a worthwhile investment even for a lazy sloth. 

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Last updated: January 2026