flybuys is one of Australia’s most popular loyalty program with more than 8.6 million members. Put another way, every third Australian is a flybuys member.

With partners such as Coles, Kmart, Target & Bunnings, members are spoilt for choice when it comes to earning flybuys points. See this link for full list of partners. Off all the relationships, its partnership with Coles is possibly the most rewarding for members given the plethora of offers flybuys send them, as well as the simple fact that we all gotta eat.

Supermarket business in Australia is more or less a duopoly, even if you are loyal to Woolworths and prioritise earning Qantas points it’s very hard to completely stay away from Coles.

Earning bonus points at Coles

Ordinarily, flybuys members earn 1 flybuys points per $1 at Coles. But that doesn’t mean you need to spend tens of thousands of dollars to earn a decent haul of points.

One of the easiest ways to supercharge your points balance is by taking advantage of the frequent bonus points offer that flybuys sends. Most of these offers are targeted and you would generally receive an email with a link to activate them, but the easiest way to keep a tab on anything that comes your way and activate them is through the flybuys app.

Track & activate offers on the flybuys app

flybuys sends all kinds of offers to members, some of them offer fixed number of bonus points on purchase of specific items such as this;

flybuys bonus points offer

others are store-specific with no requirement to buy a particular item or spend a certain amount of money, the more you spend the more points you earn.

flybuys bonus points offer

Sometimes you can earn bonus points for taking up a subscription offer, although these are not always a good deal as they can tie you in for long periods and cost money.

flybuys bonus points offer

One of the most commonly seen offer is the 4-weekly shopping offers like you see below.

flybuys bonus points offer

As you can see, with offers like these you can earn tens of thousands of points for spending money that you were going to spend on grocery anyways. Just be careful not to overshoot the spend too much or the $$ spend on future offers can quickly spiral out of control.

But the promotion I want to focus on in this post is possibly the most valuable of all, as it lets you kill two birds with one stone.

Spend once and earn twice

As the heading suggests, these kinds of offers are one of the most lucrative and produce outsized returns. Here’s how they work.

It starts with a simple spend-based offer like you see below, lets call it Offer 1.

Offer 1

Quite straightforward you would say, spend $30 and earn 1,200 flybuys points, hardly any mystery to it. Just pay attention to the validity period.

Often times, an offer like this is followed with an identical offer a few days later (see below). Take a close look at the dates on this offer and lets call this Offer 2.

Offer 2

On the face of it, Offers 1 and 2 are mutually exclusive. Offer 2 starts a day after Offer 1 ends. But here’s the thing, Offer 2 almost always hits your flybuys account on the day Offer 1 expires (10th February in this case). If you can wait until Offer 2 shows-up, then activate it and make the $30 spend on the same day (10th February), you will collect both sets of bonus points.

Let me explain this step by step, as this is a real offer I received on my flybuys account and took full advantage of it.

• I received the Offer 1 on 7th February and activated it but did not make the spend.
• Offer 2 arrived on 10th February. I activated the offer and met the $30 spend on the same day.
• A day later I received 2 x 1,200 flybuys points (total 2,400 points) in my account as you can see below.

To be clear, this isn’t a fluke and I have been profiting from this hack for several years.

I always transfer my flybuys points to Velocity, which at the ratio of 2:1 (2 flybuys points = 1 Velocity point) equates to 1,200 Velocity points on a $30 spend. That’s like earning 40 Velocity points per $1 which is an exceptional return by any yardstick.

Why does the hack work

Technically speaking, the second offer doesn’t start until the day after the first offer expires. How then you may ask, do the 2 offers stack?

The answer is that there is a glitch somewhere in flybuys IT systems. Offer 2 is triggered instantly upon activation (rather than next day as the promo is meant to), and since Offer 1 is still LIVE at the time, when you make the spend on the same day, that leads to member collecting both sets of bonus points.

Like I mentioned earlier, this is a long running hack that savvy points and miles collectors are well versed with and regularly use to their advantage. In fact, there is a very strong possibility that flybuys are aware of the loophole too, but for some reason have chosen to ignore it.

Long it may continue 😉

Do you take advantage of Spend once earn twice flybuys hack? Leave a comment below.