Discovery travel discount scheme

I have booked all my travel through the vitality platform for over a decade and have been a vitality diamond member for most of this time. I tried to book international airline tickets (with multi city stop as usual) on the vitality travel portal and was unable to successfully check out after trying for 2 days, from 27 June ‘24.

I contacted Discovery through various platforms and was given different reasons for the technical issue by all staff members I interacted with (spoke to at least 6 different staff members on the phone between 27 and 28 June ).

I sat on the line for 90 mins on 28th, while the travel desk pushed me to the bank and vice versa-with no real resolution or staff member explaining what the actual issue was or how to resolve it.

I was promised resolution by Refilwe Tao (vitality travel) and was told I would get a final call back by 5pm on 28 June and this did not happen. Instead , I received a quote for an offline booking at a much higher base cost (Siphamandla Motsum) and additional admin costs since the website was not working correctly.

I queried why I needed to pay these additional costs since I clearly found the tickets I wanted on the travel platform and the failure to check out **** with Discovery. I was then told that I may not book multi city international flights on the vitality travel platform despite having done this for over a decade. The website clearly offers the option of multi city flights (regional flights are also offered with a discount). This is clearly incorrect , but an attempt to make me cough up more money for an offline booking because the website does not work correctly. Despite the error lying on the discovery side , I was not offered any other recourse or solution over the 2 day period, except to pay thousands more through an offline process.

In recent years , Discovery has forced vitality members to obtain a Discovery bank account to make use of its full reward system. You can get 30%+ off base rate for flights, but only if you have a Discovery bank account. Alternatively , you can get a 10% discount , even if you’ve been a diamond Vitality member for well over a decade.

There is no point in paying a fee to keep a Discovery bank account open when you cannot actually make use of the rewards that are promised to you.

Do not fall for this scheme!