Distasteful Discovery - You should be ashamed!

I am not sure how many of you reading this have also experienced problems in getting your cashbacks out of Discovery Vitality. I have had numerous problems with Discovery paying fuel rewards as well as healthy food rewards in the past number of years.

Whenever there is a system glitch or whatever you want to call it, Discovery will never contact you by any means to say that they had an error and that the rewards that were due to you will be paid out timeously. You are always the one who will have to check on your rewards and then you have to query it with them. This is such a dishonest practice in my opinion. They don't own up to their own faults.

I have been with Discovery for the better part of four years now, we have Medical Aid, Car & Home Insurance, Life Policies and were members of Vitality paying our last premium at the end of July - for those of you who have not been Vitality members before, you need to give 30 days notice before you can cancel.

They will collect your premium in the last month but will give you absolutely no benefits from the day the 30 day notice period begins. In other words - you will pay for a service but receive nothing in return. I find that disgraceful and an indication of the moral perspective of the decision-makers at Discovery Vitality.

It has been the most stressful company to have to deal with. It is not the staff who you speak to at the call centre who are at fault here - for the most part they are delightful but is rather the management team who do not have to deal with the angry customers who are at fault.

To add salt to the wound, Discovery Vitality had a glitch in their own system again in June and cashback rewards were not paid out to us as they should have been. We queried this in June and were told in true Discovery style that we would have to wait till the next cash-back payout in July to receive our June rewards. We requested that the matter be escalated to a manager because we don't know why we should we wait a further 30 days to receive our cash-back rewards when they collect our premiums on time every time and without fail. This seems a bit unilateral to me. I have never missed a premium payment with Discovery.

Will your cover be intact if you miss a payment?

Further to this and following not receiving a call back from anybody at Discovery, our rewards were not paid out in July as promised. Once again we have to phone Discovery and follow up. This company is so dishonest and for me not trustworthy at all.

Discovery makes a very loud noise about the good they do, but shrug the bad under the carpet and treat their customers like numbers in their overpriced products.

Discovery also taps way to much into your personal life - wanting to "big-brother" you with all the analytics they collect from your data. I am so tired of having Discovery control at what time of night I can drive my car. I'm not looking for you to 'police' me thank you Discovery. I am a 47-year-old man who drives responsibly, do my best to look after my own health, and am really tired of all of the administration I have to do as your customer.

If you need to cash grab a few hundred bucks from your customers by not doing what is right, then how can you expect to keep them.

Thank you for reading my perspective on Discovery. If you are considering partnering with them, I urge you to read all the fine print. Don't just go on all the shiny bells and whistles nonsense they market consistently in your face. It is a much deeper and sordid experience in dealing with this conglomerate.