Some links to products and partners on this website will earn an affiliate commission.

As many readers may already know, Nectar recently rolled out a range of changes to how the programme works – particularly in relation to earning bonus points from shopping.

My first impressions of the new scheme are quite encouraging.

How it works is extremely simple. Each member receives regular personalised offers based on previous shops via the Nectar app. Select the offers you think you want to use and save them to your card. All you need to do then is go shopping for those products.

I did exactly that recently at my local Sainsbury’s and spent £5, which would have generated only 5 points under the old scheme – obviously a long way off getting any real money off travel.

Under the new scheme however, instead of collecting 5 points, I actually got 150 bonus points plus my 5 points – so I received 30+ times the value in points that I would have got before!

The next week, the same thing happened again – and remember this is just for a tiny amount of shopping, buying essentials I had to get anyway (milk, bread, fruit, etc).

I know that 150 points is still only worth 75p (or £1.50 during a double up event), but if that’s every week, it could be a nice little sum by the end of the year. Not bad, considering all you have to do is check the app occasionally and click ‘save to card’ on the offers.

Most of the points were added to my account immediately, but I have been told it can take up to 28 days.

On top of the new changess, I can confirm that the usual train offers on LNER etc do still seem to be running and these are now called ‘weekly partner offers’ in the app.

Conclusion

This shake up of the Nectar scheme seems to be pretty good so far. Obviously we’ll have to wait and see how it plays out in the longer term though before reaching any firm conclusions…