Discover Card Rewards, Sign Up Bonuses and Promotions

by Silicon Valley Blogger on 2011-12-027

Keep up with the latest rewards, sign up bonuses and promos from Discover Card.

New card holders can take advantage of deals and short term promos from credit card issuers. You’ll find that Discover Cards is one of those issuers that comes up with generous deals attached to their products. Here, you’ll find all of Discover’s latest promotions, which are usually available for a limited time only and are frequently geared towards first time account holders. There are occasions when Discover also treats their current customers to great deals. We’ll make sure to let you know about such opportunities when they happen!

Active Discover Credit Card Deals

Keep your eyes peeled for current active deals in this space.

#1 Discover Open Road – $150 Gift Certificate

The Discover Open Road card is a gas rewards credit card that is focused on providing you more rewards based on how much you spend at the fueling station. It also provides more cash back to those who love to eat out and visit their favorite restaurants and cafeterias. Here are the deals:

Get a $150 gift certificate from Restaurant.com once you become a card owner. The thing I’m not too excited about is the wait needed to receive the certificate. You’ll have to make at least one purchase within 6 months of getting approved and you’ll need to wait 8 weeks for the certificate code after making the required purchase. There are more requirements here such as the need to use the certificate only at select restaurants (then again, Restaurant.com has a ton of partners).

Apply for a Discover Open Road card and get a $150 gift certificate.
Discover Open Road Bonus

#2 Escape By Discover Card — Up To 25,000 Bonus Miles

Besides the 0% intro APR on balance transfers and purchases for 6 months, great travel benefits and travel rewards you pile on at a rate of 2x per dollar spent, you can accumulate rewards that amount to a maximum of $250 (or the equivalent of 1,000 bonus miles each month you buy through your card, for the first 25 months that you’re a card owner). That’s a total of 25,000 bonus miles total.

Apply for a Discover Escape card and receive up to $250 in rewards.
Discover Escape Bonus

#3 Discover Student Card — $25 Cash Back

Right now, Discover’s card geared towards college students is offering a cash bonus of $25. You can find out more about this particular offer in our special page for college student credit cards.

#4 Discover More — No Balance Transfer Fee Offer

The Discover More card with no balance transfer fee has made a comeback. You can check more details in our credit card deals and offers page, which also showcases a lot of other great cards with limited time offers.

For more information, you can also check out our special section on Discover credit cards.

Please keep checking this page for the most recent Discover Card deals. We keep this page updated!

Expired Discover Promotions

We also keep around a list of expired promotions from Discover on this page in order to keep track of the great product opportunities they provide on occasion. This gives us perspective on how Discover operates.

Discover & Zynga Partner Up For Holiday Game

This promo has expired.

This a joint marketing campaign between Discover and Zynga, and the card that is being promoted for this purpose is currently in limited quantity. I found this offer interesting as I come from a gaming family (my spouse is a video game developer). Discover has announced that they are sponsoring a version of FarmVille, which many Facebookers and social networking types know and love. This Zynga game will be ready to launch during the holiday season, on December 5, 2011 and is aptly themed for the holidays. So what can you expect from this development? Well, if you’re a gamer, you might appreciate this particular tie-in. Here’s how this particular promotion works:

  1. On December 2, FarmVille players will be able to search for the “Discover” farm.
  2. From the Discover farm, you’ll be able to check out an expansion called “Winter Wonderland”. This will be made available to all players on December 5.
  3. You’re promised free online/virtual gifts by Discover. Some examples are an “It Pays To Discover Tree”, a “Cashback Bonus Castle” and a Yeti. These items can yield you hundreds of coins, but you’ll have to perform certain quests or challenges to win or “unlock” these gifts.
  4. Apparently, if you “Like” the Discover Facebook Fan page, you’ll get clues to how to unlock the gifts. Here is Discover’s Facebook Page for those who are curious.
  5. This promo is only available for a short time: as a card member, you can exchange $25 cash back for a $50 Zynga Game Card, which can be used as game currency. And if you sign up for a new Discover More card by December 14, you can get a $100 Zynga Game Card after your initial purchase (check the Discover Facebook Page for more info). The Discover More card that you are signing up for here has a 0% intro APR on purchases for 9 months. Note that this promo is different from the others we’ve described above and cannot be used in conjunction with those other promos.

Here are some cool images that give you a feel for what’s in the FarmVille Winter Wonderland expansion:

Discover & FarmVille
Discover & FarmVille Rewards

Have fun!

Discover More Card — $150 Cash Bonus, Limited Offer For The 2011 Holidays

While the Discover More credit card has gone beyond its vanilla version and now has a couple of 0% APR cards, there are also interesting versions of Discover More that may pop up under certain marketing campaigns. For example, this $150 cash back bonus card from Discover was available as a holiday promo for 2011. If you signed up and then made purchases that were worth $1,000 within the first 3 months, you would have been entitled to $150 in cash back. This card also had a 0% rate offer attached.

Created November 6, 2008. Updated December 2, 2011. Copyright © 2011 The Digerati Life. All Rights Reserved.

{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }

AmeriGlide November 7, 2008 at 7:18 am

I have also noticed that Discover does often have some pretty good deals. There are some places that don’t accept it though…

Silicon Valley Blogger November 7, 2008 at 5:58 pm

If Discover ever becomes as available as the other major credit cards out there, there would be no stopping them. 😉 Why they don’t become more ubiquitous (as credit cards go), I don’t know. Are they just more stingy with their vendors and merchants?

Jesse W. November 8, 2008 at 9:02 pm

I will definitely have to do some more research on Discover as I always like getting free things!

Austin Real Estate Broker November 12, 2008 at 7:02 pm

I have a Discover card, but I always considered mine way lame. I can’t make a major purchase on it and they are 5% of my other cards’ limits. I use them only at Sam’s for bulk buys and gas when I’m near a Sam’s.

The rewards would be nice, but again, I’d wind up making payments every 20 days so I never over spent on my limit if I used Discover as a primary card. Anyone else experience a drastically lower limit on Discover than on other cards?

Joe

Matt @ SF November 25, 2008 at 11:04 am

Nice tip — I hold a Discover Card and didn’t know about so many offers. Thanks for the heads up.

Josh July 8, 2009 at 12:43 pm

Others have asked why Discover is not as common as other brands. The reason is Discover has made a fatal mistake around merchant fees. Discover charges more to the merchant (store) to accept a discover card then Visa/Mastercard do. Discover needs to lower their merchant fees to compete with Visa/Mastercard.

Silicon Valley Blogger December 2, 2010 at 2:48 pm

I just want to inform you of some Expired Discover Card Promotions. Please note that the following bonuses and terms are no longer valid and have expired: Discover Rewards For The Holidays: the Discover Mall Promo (Turn Receipts Into Rewards). Even though it has expired, we describe it below.

In the past, the Discover Mall promotion has given away $20 Discover Gift Cards if you shopped at participating stores using your Discover card. This promo has expired, but you can read more about it in detail below. It’s one reward program that is likely to come back by the time the holidays swing by again. If you sign up for any one of Discover’s credit cards, you’ll be privy to regular rewards like these that crop up on a regular basis.

Could this promo be back for the holidays? This particular event gave away sign up bonuses and gift cards to all Discover card account holders.

Discover offered a $20 Discover Gift Card for every $200 you charged on your credit card at over 160 participating shopping malls throughout the nation. Actually, “Turn Receipts Into Rewards” has been an ongoing, popular program for Discover in the past, with a lot of qualifying malls participating.

How can you join the program (only when the program is ongoing of course)?

1. Be a Discover cardholder. If you’re not yet a card customer and are interested in opening an account, you can apply for any of Discover’s credit cards (some of which offer sign up bonuses as well) to become eligible for the Discover Gift Card and future promotions. Note that the gift card offer applies to all Discover cards.

2. Shop at any one of the eligible, participating stores in this program using your Discover Card.

3. Collect all your shopping receipts for a given period of time.

4. Claim up to 5 gift cards (for a $100 total value) by submitting your receipts that total at least $200 to the customer service desk of the malls where you’ve shopped.

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