Good afternoon everyone, I hope you had a great weekend.  One of my travel hacking / miles and points goals this year is to simplify my life and use less card-linked / reward apps that track all my purchases.  I have “used” Drop for several years.  And by “used” I mean I created an account, linked all my cards to it, and waited for the rewards to roll in.  Over the years, I seem to earn less and less points with Drop and now my points are barely trickling into my account.  Drop introduced Drop Premium which gives you 1,000 points per month just for being a member and claiming the points.  I’m convinced this is a tactic used by Drop to keep members active.  If you want to redeem your Drop points for a gift card, you need to have a minimum of 25,000 points.  I believe it used to be 10,000 points for a $10 gift card, but Drop got rid of that redemption option (to increase orphaned points in the accounts and reduce gift card expenses).

Long story short, I was about 7,000 points short of my 25,000 point goal to redeem my points for a $25 gift card.  Conveniently, Drop introduced a Top-Up feature where you can buy points.  I decided to buy 7,000 points for $9 in order to redeem my 25,000 points for a $25 gift card.  That seemed like a decent deal to me.  I will show you some of the roadblocks I went through and how I closed my Drop account at the end of this post.

I didn’t take screenshots before I bought the points, but this is what my account looked like after I used the Top-Up feature.  I have had that 20,000 point referral bonus sitting there for months, so I doubt those points will ever come (this might be another tactic Drop uses to keep members around).  In the Points History section, you can see I bought 7,000 points on May 7 and received 1,000 points each month I opened the app and claimed the points.  It looks like I forgot to open the app between January 10 and April 6 since I didn’t get any points during that period.

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