Points & miles
Earn rates, transfer partners and expiry rules for airline, hotel and retail point schemes — recorded when they change, not when a brand announces them.
Independent since 2019 · Riga, Latvia
We read the fine print on loyalty programs so you keep the reward.
Alo Rewards is a small research desk that logs points, cashback and membership offers month after month, then publishes one honest digest of the few that genuinely pay back.
What we track
Three ledgers, kept by hand.
Cashback & rebates
Real payout percentages, minimum thresholds and how long money actually takes to land back in your account — measured against our own test purchases.
Membership perks
Subscription rewards and store clubs weighed by what they return per year versus their fee, so a perk that never pays for itself gets flagged plainly.
By the numbers
A running total of the desk.
312
Programs on file
and updated monthly
and updated monthly
190h
Reading & testing
logged per year
logged per year
83%
Offers screened out
before an issue
before an issue
1
Digest published
each month, on time
each month, on time
Inside an issue
What a digest line looks like.
Every program we cover gets one ruled row: a short read, a one-line finding, and a plain verdict. Here are four sample entries.
01
Keep
Grocery Loyalty Card — points on staples
Earn rate held steady, but the redemption floor quietly doubled. Still worth carrying if you shop weekly.
02
Watch
Travel Card — quarterly cashback tiers
Headline rate looks strong; the cap kicks in early. Good for one big trip, thin the rest of the year.
03
Keep
Coffee Chain Club — free-drink stamps
Simple and fair. Reward lands in about six visits, and stamps no longer expire mid-year.
04
Drop
Streaming Rewards — watch-and-earn perks
Payout math never clears the monthly fee. We dropped it from the file this quarter.
Full context, sources and the current reader offer live in the latest issue → read the digest
Who we are
A three-person desk with a long spreadsheet.
Alo Rewards started in 2019 as a shared notebook between three friends who were tired of loyalty schemes that looked generous and paid back almost nothing. We are not affiliated with any bank, retailer or points provider, and we do not accept placement fees.
The work is deliberately slow: we track a program for months, make our own test purchases, and only write it up once we can say something useful. Readers fund the digest, which keeps our verdicts honest and our inbox free of pitches.