Discover has made some great changes to their travel reward card (The Miles Card) and in my opinion, this is now a serious card to consider for those looking for a reward card to earn free airline tickets.

The old Discover Miles Card was like a regular travel reward credit card where you earned points and redeem them for airline tickets and other goodies like merchandise, gift certificates and cash rebates. I did not like the old Discover Miles Card because you needed more than 25,000 miles to claim your free airline ticket (most programs require just 25,000 miles or points).

The new program is completely different and is more like the Amex Blue Sky or the Capital One No Hassle Miles program. With the new Discover Miles Card, you earn the usual reward points (or miles), but you can redeem them for any travel purchase. You earn one mile for every dollar you spend and double miles on up to $3,000 in travel and restaurant purchases.You can book your own airline ticket and then use the miles to get a credit from that expenditure. Let’s use an example. You buy an airline ticket for $200. If you have 20,000 miles in your account, you can use that to get a credit to your airline ticket expense on the card.

A program like this provides advantages over regular credit card reward programs. Firstly, you can use any travel agent to get the best deals (even internet travel agents). You are free from the usual restrictions like having to book 21 days in advance, having to stay a Saturday night. That means no blackout dates or restrictions.

You can also use your miles to redeem other stuff as well. For example, you can use them to redeem for gift certificates. Discover Miles has got 50 merchant partners. However, this is not that attractive because you need more points to redeem for a certain value of gift certificates than other reward programs. For example, you need to use 1,000 Miles for a $5 gift card, 3,500 Miles for $25, 6,000 Miles for $50 and more. The better cards allow you to use (for example) 1,000 points for a $10 gift card, 2,000 points for a $20 gift card etc. There is also a cash back program where you effectively exchange miles for cash at a 0.5% cash rebate percentage. Once again, you should not be getting this card for this feature.

If you are the type of person that likes to find your own deal on the internet, and want to use miles for any airline and any flight, then I would highly recommend the Miles by Discover® Card.

As a teaser, new cardholders get 12,000 bonus miles and a 0% APR deal for 12 months as well.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Discover Credit Cards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.