I've been given an offer of Reka money by my employer, with them covering 20% of the cost up to 800 Sfr.
I've had a look at the Reka website, and it seems that the Reka card is accepted at a lot of places, but I'd appreciate some real-world feedback. Do you use Reka? Do you find it beneficial, or do you struggle to use up your funds as the year draws to an end? Is it cumbersome to manage / top up?
Any info is appreciated, cheers
Since giving up the GA last year, we used Reka to buy our Halbtax abo, plus registered it as payment method in the SBB App. So that’s 50% off public transport fares with the Halbtax plus another 20% off with the Reka money.
.........20% of Chf 800.-- is..............wait for it...........Chf 160.-- !!
As Tony says, it is basically free money you can use with CFF and a variety of the services, check put Reka on the web.
Essentially, you do some good at a 20% discount.
My reason for asking for advice is that you can get various cards like this in Australia, but there are so many catches and loopholes that it's almost impossible to actually use the funds, i.e. some are only accepted at a very small number of locations or only up to a certain amount in a single timeframe.
Similar stories about difficulty in claiming exist for airline miles, supermarket loyalty cards (I recall an investigation in Oz that found with one supermarket card, you'd need to spend $10,000 before you saw a reward of... wait for it... $5!!), etc. Hence wanting 'real world feedback' on how beneficial it really is, and if there are any faults or things I should be aware of.
Please do consider that when someone new to the country asks for advice on here, it's generally not deemed a 'no brainer' to that person.
You can also buy petrol at 20% from Avia stations...
It is not a "trick" to take your money and REKA money never expires. The initial goal was to make holidays in Switzerland more affordable for Swiss residents (as compared to tourists) to entice them to stay here rather than going abroad.
With the COOP supermarket card you can convert the points in purchase credits. You get 1 point per spent CHF, and with 1000 points you get 10 CHF credit, so overall 1% back. Plus if you pay some attention there are a lot of coupons and promotions with discounts or extra points, e.g. if you buy a box of wine when there is 10x points on wine it's almost a 10% discount.
The prizes are also interesting, on average.
Migros has something similar, too.
Totally worth it, I wish I would have known about REKA from the very first beginning.
I won’t activate a 5x points Bon for example if I’m just going to buy a pint of milk and a loaf of bread, I’ll save it for a big shop. If they were all activated by default it would be applied the first time I went to the store.