Discovery Vitality Nightmare

I joined Discovery Health & Discovery Vitality on 3 December 2025. After about a week worth of admin & emails (this is normal), I finally got activated and all 3 apps apps installed. A guy from their call centre helped me set up the Apps on 8 December 2025 & to choose Woolworths and Dischem as my shopping partners for the Miles/cash back system; this was done on their website.

It is nearing end of January 2026 and I've yet to receive any cash backs for my Woolworths Food purchases. I've spent 10+ hours and R200 worth of airtime on dealing with Discovery call centers and a little bit with woolworths (by they've proven to me they are not at fault). I've spent around R15K for the December/January cycle at Woolworths but Discovery claims that I have made zero purchases. I can see on their apps that my woolies cards are linked and woolworths also proved to me (screenshots of their backend system from headoffice) that shows the integration is active (and the activation date was 8 December). Woolworths app also shows that my discovery Miles account is setup successfully as a payment method.

Discovery's customer service has been atrocious and the last indian lady I spoke got really mean and sent me to a physical woolworths store customer support and the woolworths staff invited me to their backoffice to show me on their system all my info is correct (as discovery has given me 4 different reasons why its not working, 2 of which they blamed on me). She said I must go to woolies and show my ID and sign a third party consent form...yet all this stuff is supposed to be automatic. As expected, the woolworths manager just shook their head as there is no process like that on their system and they have no way to query vitality. One agent even told me I changed my card to Checkers on the 1st of December, but I was not even a customer at that time and no access to their systems. When I chose Woolworths and Dischem on the 8th of December, Checkers or Click were not preselected. The last guy I spoke to today said my woolies benefit is not activated (which is false, we can see it is activated on Discovery Website and Apps, woolies also confirmed it is active and all of his colleagues has detected the link)

Dischem cashback worked fine (way less than expected, but it works. Got about R30 back on R2000 worth of purchases). Meh whatever.

I'm just really disgusted and at my wits end being passed around from person to person and being blamed. I've heard bad things about discovery before I joined and not I understand why people leave them. Its a super complex system with so many rules, you have to have grit to deal with it and have to be a genius just to wrap your mind around it. Now I'm stuck with them for the 2026 year (cause I foolishly got medical aid, gap cover, life cover, vitality AND Virgin Active Gym membership), so have to wait for Gym membership to lapse. But I will definitely move away from discovery end of this year because of this. One agent said I will only get cashbacks from 15 March onwards. ***. Oh and don't get me started on their chatbots (on their website and on whatsapp) - it will just end the convo while still busy chatting and when trying again, it won't connect me to a human. They have no email to contact so you are at mercy of their bots and their call centre staff which seems don't have much power or knowledge how to fix the problem.

So I feel violated & ****med. Typically once a company has violated me I will leave and never come back. Ask Santam and MTN (20 years ago), I will never be their customer again for them or any of their affiliates. Same happening here with discovery. I'm a new customer but their onboarding is a complete disaster and I feel discarded. The way their staff blames me is crazy unprofessional (the level of contempt is unbelievable).

Here is my Vitality number if you want to fix it: ***

Don't phone me with apologies, I don't care anymore, FIX the problem or let me know HOW TO actually fix the problem. You are welcome to reimburse me for my time (lets make it 10 hours + call out fee to drive to woolies) at my salary rate (you know how much I earn, welcome to work it out). You already destroyed the value & sentiment for me for being with discovery, I will now just wait out the calendar months & exit.