If you’re one of those people like me who were happy to collect Tesco Clubcard points up then spend the resulting vouchers on a bottle of wine in-store when they came in, it might be time to think again. Tesco Clubcard Rewards has been running for some time but its surprising how few people know about it.

Put it this way, I used Tesco Clubcard points to pay for a £270 ferry to Belfast last week. I didn’t use a penny of my own money.

Tesco rewards are worth 4 times the value of the original Clubcard vouchers and can be used for travel, days out, restaurants and a whole variety of other things. You can even swap them for Air Miles. So for the ferry voucher we used £70 of Tesco clubcard vouchers. OK, it took a bit of time to save up all those vouchers but in the end we’ve got a summer trip to Northern Ireland for the family.

The booking process for the ferry was fairly straightforward. We received our vouchers then went to the Tesco Clubcard website where we swapped the vouchers for Ferry rewards tokens. When they arrived in the post we phoned up the ferry company and booked a month ahead of time. We posted off the rewards tokens to the ferry company and when they received them they confirmed the booking.

Even if you don’t want to save up for the big value items, a tenner of Clubcard vouchers will buy you £40 of restaurant vouchers. That should be enough for a meal for 2 in many of the restaurants they list.