Yesterday, Yelp announced a brand new Yelp Cashback program. You can earn up to 10% cashback on select Yelp partner restaurants. The program is brand new, so I haven’t had the chance to play with it or see if the restaurants I would typically frequent are part of the cashback program, but might as well sign up as it is free.

First, sign up for the program by going to https://www.yelp.com/cashback

Next, link up a credit card. It says the cashback program is powered by Empyr, and not Rewards Network which is used by the various hotel and airline dining programs, so it is possible that you could double dip if a restaurant is in both. I could be wrong about this though. A fellow travel hacker noted though, that the list of restaurants seemed to be identical to iDine, which is on Rewards Network, so double dipping might not be possible. Also, it looks like only Visa, Mastercard, and American Express cards can be enrolled, so no Discover cards.

Card enrollment instructions

You can find cashback restaurants by including the term “cash back” in your search (can be combined with other terms, so you can search “cash back indian“.) You can also select the Cash Back filter in the mobile app or desktop website.

Cashback restaurants

I was sent these instructions on how it would work. It looks like online orders are excluded, and they will send a credit to the first card you linked at the end of the month with your accumulated cashback. I hope the credit doesn’t mean you lose points on the cashback earned though, but that is likely the case. I might recommend linking a debit card first, then a points earning credit card. If you already linked a credit card first, you can remove it from your Account Settings -> Payment Information.

Instructions

I’ll see if this actually affects which restaurants I decide to eat at! My common criticism of the various other dining programs is they never had enough density or restaurants that I wanted to eat at.

You can read the announcement here:
https://www.yelpblog.com/2016/12/earn-rewards-save-local-businesses-yelp-cash-back