Last month my daughter arrived in Los Angeles for a work assignment.
Meanwhile, I was sitting in London looking at the monthly Uber credits across our three Platinum cards and one Gold card, all due to expire in a few days.
In an ideal world, applying the Uber Credit to my daughter’s airport-hotel ride would have made most sense.
The obvious idea was to try to pay for her Uber from LAX, but airport pickups depend on live driver locations, changing pickup areas and real-time communication. Trying to coordinate all of that remotely sounded far more complicated than it was worth.
Lunch, on the other hand, was something I’d become much more comfortable with.
A few WhatsApp messages later we’d settled on Joe & The Juice. Twenty minutes after that I’d ordered it through Uber Eats from London, using US-only Amex Uber credits, and was watching the courier make the delivery to her hotel.
It isn’t a technique I discovered on this trip. I’ve been doing variations of this for some time whenever I’m outside the United States and monthly Uber credits are about to expire. Uber doesn’t make it easy, but once you’ve worked out a repeatable process it’s another useful option to have in reserve.
Why I bother
If you live in the United States, the monthly Uber credits on the Amex Platinum and Gold cards are almost effortless. They’ll usually disappear on the first airport ride or takeaway of the month.
Our household currently has three personal Platinum cards and one Gold card. Between them that’s $720 of Uber credits each year. We travel back to the US regularly enough that most months they look after themselves, but every now and then we’ll go a month or two without setting foot in America.
That’s when these little operational workarounds become useful.
I don’t start forcing the credits on the first of the month. Travel plans change, and an unexpected US trip can make the problem disappear by itself. Only when it gets to the last few days of the month with nothing on the calendar do I start looking for alternatives.
For years my fallback has been Uber Eats. Friends. Family. Anyone who happens to be in the US and wouldn’t mind lunch on me.
This time it happened to be my daughter.
The awkward bit
The difficult part isn’t sending somebody food.
It’s persuading Uber that, despite the fact you’re sitting in London, what you really want to do is order lunch in Los Angeles.
Outside the US, Uber recognised the credits but marked them as unavailable.
Left to its own devices, the app assumes you want to order wherever you’re physically standing. That’s entirely logical, but not very helpful in this situation. If the app believes you are not in the US, your US credits are not able to be used. Operationally, even searching for US addresses and browsing local restaurants can be problematic unless you first persuade Uber that you’re operating in the US.
After enough trial and error over the years, the process that’s worked consistently for me is:
Turn off location services before opening Uber.
The first step is stopping Uber from automatically using your current location.
Temporarily disabling location access has proved more reliable than leaving it enabled.
Unfortunately that alone hasn’t proved sufficient in my experience. Additionally:
Connect through a US VPN.
Using the app from abroad has been more reliable with a US VPN.
Manually search for the US delivery address.
Build the Uber Eats order as normal.
Add the recipient’s contact details.
Pay using the enrolled Amex Platinum or Gold card so the monthly credit applies.
From there everything behaves normally. You can watch the courier, message the recipient and track the delivery exactly as though you were in the US yourself.
Once the order is placed, everything behaves normally, including live tracking.
The completed order showing pickup at Joe & The Juice and delivery to the hotel.
A US$30 order quickly became almost US$45 once fees, taxes and tip were added.
A couple of observations
The important requirement isn’t being physically present in the United States. I completed the entire order from London.
Nor did I need a US SIM card or US mobile network.
The key requirement was using an eligible enrolled Amex card as the payment method. The VPN and disabled location services weren’t there for Amex’s benefit; they were simply the combination that stopped Uber continually dragging me back to the UK experience.
Final thoughts
This isn’t especially elegant.
If I’m in the US, using the credits naturally is vastly easier and that’s what I do as often as that’s the case.
This process only comes out when I’m overseas, nothing is planned before month-end, and the alternative is letting perfectly good credits expire. In those circumstances, spending a few minutes persuading Uber that I’m really ordering lunch in Los Angeles rather than London is a trade I’m happy to make.
Like a lot of the operational work involved in managing US credit cards from overseas, this isn’t something I’d bother doing unless the alternative was letting the credits expire. Most months I simply use them naturally during a US trip. Every now and then, though, it’s useful to have another option available.