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Discover has eliminated Extended Product Warranty, Return Guarantee, Purchase Protection, Auto Rental Insurance and Flight Accident Insurance across their card products as of February 28, 2018. These are insurance benefits provided simply by being a cardmember and take effect when you use your Discover card for the associated transaction.
Depending on how you use your card, this could be significant or might not have any impact on you whatsoever. It's important to keep in mind that you likely have another credit card that provides similar types of protection.
What Benefits Have Been Eliminated?
No changes have happened to the rewards/cash-back structure with Discover. All of the changes were related to ancillary card benefits that add value to the overall card offering. These benefits are complimentary and are insurance protections provided by Discover through a 3rd party. Here's the rundown:
- Extended Product Warranty – Covered qualifying purchases for an additional year when the manufacturer’s warranty is 36 months or less (Other card options for warranty protection)
- Return Guarantee – Return your product even if a store will not accept your return within 90 days
- Purchase Protection – Short term insurance coverage protected damaged or stolen purchases up to $500 for 90 days after purchase (Other options for purchase protection)
- Auto Rental Insurance – Secondary CDW/LDW insurance on rental cars up to $25,000 (Best cards for primary car rental coverage)
- Flight Accident Insurance – Purchase an airline ticket in full with your Discover card, receive reimbursement for the accidental death of you and your Covered Dependent(s) within one year of the flight accident, up to $500,000
Which Loss is Significant?
In the end, no single benefit loss is significant as you can receive these benefits, and sometimes better benefits (especially with auto rental insurance), from other card products. The significance here is that your Discover products will no longer have these benefits and you might opt to use a different card when completing a purchase.
Our Take
We definitely don't like losing benefits, but if Discover is eliminating the benefits they're likely doing it because their customers aren't getting the value that was hoped. If customers aren't leveraging card benefits, why would you continue to offer them? The flip side might be the associated cost for Discover has increased and they're trying to limit expenditure, but Discover has indicated that they're doing this as a matter of eliminating features that aren't being used.
Take a look through the cards you have and review our master post on guides to benefits to see what benefits you have that you may not have known about.
Source: Doctor of Credit & Ask Sebby
The comments on this page are not provided, reviewed, or otherwise approved by the bank advertiser. It is not the bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.
