Rides above $10
Generally in any kind of TravelHacking you are looking for arbitrage opportunities and cross combining multiple promotions. You become a pentester of terms and conditions and currency mechanics.
For example you may cross a discounted business class flight (India-America at $1333) (taking a flight with miles or cash to start in India) that racks up the usual cross continental miles which you can push into a miles redemption promo e.g. UOB 20% extra Asia Miles award, which you then use to redeem another set of flights which alone might not award miles but can set up a similar arbitrage. And then you throw away the India-Singapore leg plane ticket. With that said, you actually do need to fly (your business, work or leisure) for the miles game to be of any use to you, and actually find premium of some value to you to activate it (e.g. if your favorite destination is Kuala Lumpur or Thailand, a business or first upgrade may not be particular different from a budget seat)
Keeping Grab costs under control requires the combination of several techniques, smoothening them into an arbitrage.
The first is to grab the program by NTUC, Grab-Score
Used to be $18 which was a no brainer but is $30 now. Price will increase supposedly as they add more partners, but you can always cancel if it isn’t delivered next year. There’s 1000 linkpoints and a free PLUS! membership for the NTUC (along with some weak bonuses, unless you do heavy groceries) The strength is in the Grab 30×20% up to $4 vouchers after the first 4 trips in a month and the 50%x6 on the 3rd monday up to $6 after 12pm.
Naturally for the 4 trips you will be using coupons and points to clear into the 20%. Liveup also works to give you one $10 per 10 rides (replacing Uber) if you are on the Liveup scheme.
Generally this works out to be 20% and $1 for your general Grab spend. Keep in mind too that since a lot of people will stop grabbing due to zero base promotions, this will sharply reduce Surge pricing except for the weekday evening peak period which can still fluctuate. You can work around this by switching to comfort flat fare booking system once grab surges beyond the high 20s.
This is then combined with the Standard Chartered cards.
www.sc.com/sg/promotions/grab/
You can do this with either the Singpost or the Unlimited Cashback card. Singpost is mostly for online spend cashback (though there are better alternatives) but if you use vpost/Taobao you may already have this. I went with the Unlimited Cashback for flexibility and the World Mastercard option.
It’s 2% v 1.5% which in any case isn’t the main weight.
You’re going for the $30 for $150 of spending, which works if you spend roughly that amount a month. This assumes that you have some other useful spending for the remainder. Possibly you might not.
In that case, you would hit the signup bonuses heavily for the base $100, mobile usage $20, additional card $20 as well as the free blender/bluetooth speaker. You can then hit the $900 the first calendar month and the $900 the next calendar month taking into account such promotions. That gives you $1800 of grab at $236 of cashback +/- a bit and peripherals.
You then combine this with the spin to win
www.sc.com/sg/promotions/spintowin/
This gives you a lucky draw per $150 (which should be your grab top up amount). This ends in Jul 15.
| Prize Description | Total Quantities |
| a. $2 cashback | 40,000 |
| b. $3 cashback | 70,650 |
| c. $5 cashback | 20,000 |
| d. $10 cashback | 7,000 |
| e. $20 cashback | 2,000 |
| f. $30 cashback | 200 |
| g. $50 cashback | 100 |
| h. $100 cashback | 50 |
| Total | 140,000 Prizes |
A ballpark is perhaps 5-10% depending on how the statistics flow.
You will also get $5 cashback if you spend on coffee overseas (well any overseas F&B transaction) even if it’s $1 (*hint Johor)
Topping this, you get Grab reward points on your rides, 16 for normal rides and 5 for grabpay purchases at normal shops/food places that don’t normally accept credit card or NETS.
This comes to about 4.67% to 8.64% depending on what you redeem it for. If you can get a good promo redemption that could go further, otherwise if you only use it for Grab you can get a baseline of about 4-4.67% return. For example, the $5 Prata Wala only takes 950 points, while a baked averaged cost of grab is 1700-1800 points per dollar.
(Remember every transaction made without a nearest competing alternative basically eats away at the minimum spend requirement)
So summing it up:
20% Score, then you have to eat at the 80% remainder of which:
Stanchart knocks off 10-20%, Spin to win brings it up to 15-30% and Grab rewards to 20-39%
You get roughly an efficiency of only needing to pay 64 cents on the dollar to 48 cents on the dollar. (Or if you can use Stanchart discounts efficiently like frequenting their 1 for 1 eateries or hotel promotions you can max it to an even lower figure)
Standard Chartered Fast Track Grab Platinum
An interesting homage to the usual Hotels and Car Rental fast track plans, much like the Hilton Honors 2 stays/4nights plan and match, here you take 4 rides into a fasttracked Grab Premium, allowing you to get the redemption perks.
GrabRewards Platinum Tier Status Promotion
Simply complete 4 GrabCar and/or GrabCar (Premium) rides from now till 31 July 2018 to enjoy GrabRewards Platinum Tier Status till 31 December 2018. Only applicable for Standard Chartered Visa Infinite Credit Card, Visa Signature Credit Card and Mastercard® World Credit Card.The Eligible Cardholder will be upgraded to Platinum Tier Status by Grab automatically within 30 days upon the completion of 4 GrabCar and/or GrabCar (Premium) rides transactions.Terms and conditions apply3
Rides below $10
You would have get a bit creative here, generally the strategy changes as the 20% becomes less efficient, however, this means you wouldn’t need the heavy lifting of the grab credits. What you want here is to somewhat resurrect the promo codes of old like -$5 and -$10. Keep in mind the leftovers will go towards the heavylifting strats laid out above, maintaining your discount ratios.
How would you go about doing that? Well, there are wholesale retailers/resellers of grab coupons.
One way could be using a Citi Rewards 4mpd into a Mileslife $10off promo x 10 offer. You can use this with say a Signup promotion that unlocks those miles such that you wouldn’t have to spend it in the store. This allows you to burn the minimum spend into something useful (5mpd) similar to the strategy above.
There are also the intermediaries
You will see Fuzee and Shopee promotions here and there. Generally it could be a free $5 voucher for signup or promo reward, alternatively it could be a credit card promotion. You would then purchase it into your credit card which gives miles.
Bringing us to:
Singtel-DASH
This workaround uses the DASH singtel shop in which you can bill vouchers to your monthly Singtel post payment. Generally DASH gives 5%, but the trick here is applepay which throws in another 8mpd if you’re using Citirewards. This comes out to only 21%, but matches the general discount you can use to push the rides further. (This works if you’ve unloaded $2000 for Citirewards and have already used it to dump into a heavy phone line for a new phone)
Shopping Malls with unbound Grab vouchers
Say a shopping mall gives $10 grab without restrictions on location on say F&B Spend of $50, you can apple pay 8mpd (16%) with Entertainer/Burpple/1for1 offers to cheese the vouchers out. Alternatively sometimes this can work for NTUC, then you may want to load up on vouchers for personal use or trade.
Capitaland Grab vouchers in the past are also one alternative if your points include a Capitaland mall.
Note that promo code components do not get Grab Reward points.
