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Review of the Discover Escape Credit Card

Last Reviewed: 7/17/2010

The Discover Escape credit card (aka Escape by Discover) masquerades as a travel credit card, but is really falls into what I believe is a unique class of cards which I would dub “restricted cash-back credit cards”. Restrictions aside, this piece of plastic is a heavy hitter, and is frequently at the top of the PlasticIQ Ranking Engine.  You can apply directly for Discover Escape, or continue reading this review for more insights into why even Clint Eastwood would have wanted this card in his back pocket when he popped out of the Bay soaking wet.

How Does The Discover Escape Credit Card Stack Up Against The Competition (updated as of 5/30/2011)

 
Rank 4 (out of 46 cashback cards tracked by PlasticIQ
Net card earnings* $1,123
Value of rewards for top card (Amex Blue Cash Preferred) $1,441

*Based on PlasticIQ’s standard spending profile for 3 years of card usage

Snapshot: Escape by Discover Card
Rewards 2 miles for every $1 spent, no spend category restrictions
Sign-up Bonus 25,000 miles, earned 1,000 per month (must use card for at least one purchase that month) for first 25 months.
Miles expiration Never expire; however, if your account is closed or inactive for 18 months or you fail to make the minimum payment due for 2 months in a row, your miles will be lost.
Mileage caps None
Redemption requirements Miles can be redeemed for any airline, cruise, vacation package, hotel or car rental (no booking restrictions or requirements); $100 travel credit for every 10,000 miles. Miles must be redeemed within 90 days of the travel event posting to your account.
Annual fee $60

Escape by Discover Rewards

Cardholders earn 2 “miles” for every $1 of spend, with no restrictions or earning caps. The reason this card is more like a cash back card than a travel card is because these so-called miles can be used to off-set most types of major travel (airline, cruise, vacation package, car rentals).

These rewards behave much more like a cash back statement credit than airline miles. As long as you do even a modest amount of travel each year, you should be able to take full advantage of these rewards and the card will effectively behave like a cash back card.

Alternate Redemption Options for Discover Escape Card

The only valuable redemption option is applying miles towards travel, since your miles are then valued at $0.01 per mile. But for the sake of completeness, we do mention the other redemption methods.

You can redeem 5,000 miles to get a $25 Discover gift card—a horrible redemption value of $0.005 per mile. Equally bad, you can receive an electronic bank deposit of $25 for 5,000 miles. You can also use your miles to purchase gift cards, but as the table and screenshot below illustrate, the exchange rates are quite bad. The best value you can hope to achieve, if you buy the most expensive partner gift cards, is around $0.0083 per mile–really quite bad even when compared to a basic 1% cashback card.

Miles Required to Purchase Partner Gift Cards
Value of Partner Gift Card Miles Required Value/Mile
$5 1,000 $0.0050
$25 4,000 $0.0062
$50 7,000 $0.0071
$100 12,000 $0.0083

discover-partner-gift-cards

Discover Escape Rates, Expenses and Fees

The Discover Escape card has an annual fee of $60. The 25,000 sign-up bonus miles (earned over 25 months) are worth $250, so basically it’s like getting a 4-year suspension of the annual fee.

There is no foreign transaction fee on this card.

PlasticIQ’s Final Assessment of the Discover Escape Credit Card

The Discover Escape credit card is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, one of our favorite cards on the site. The combination of what basically amounts to a 2% cashback card (albeit with some easily addressed redemption restrictions) and a nice sign-up bonus make it hard to resist. Escape deserves its spot at or near the top of our PIQ Ranking Engine.

Cards discussed:

Escape by Discover Card
Apply for the Discover Escape Credit Card

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 18th, 2010 at 10:49 pm and is filed under Travel Rewards Programs. 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.

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  • http://mbilf.com Tom

    I’m not sure, but maybe you’ve gotten your numbers wrong? Divide everything by half and pretend you got one point per dollar instead. You’ll see that this is actually a 1% back card.

    Example: You earn 1 mile per dollar spent. Then a $25 gift card/credit costs 2500 ‘miles’. A $100 partner gift card goes from 12,000 to 6,000 ‘miles’, or 6000 points for $100 (effectively $60 cashback = $100 gift card, a huge discount). But that’s still not 2% cashback (that’d be 5000 points for $100). And if you want to play that game, Discover More is more than 1% (or 0.25%) cashback when you save up enough, because $20 for $25 cards in $100 denoms cost $80 (it’s always the same discount, $20 = $25, $40 = $50, $80 = $100, this continues when it’s $45 = $50 and $90 = $100).

    What surprises me is that, unlike Discover More, you go from 2000 ‘points’ for $25 to 3500 ‘points’ for $50, when it should be 4000 points. Amazing. But, are there ShopDiscover rewards?

  • Marc

    Tom, we at PlasticIQ love a good ol fashioned challenge to our handiwork. We’ve looked it over, and the PlasticIQ analysis is correct and on-target, like a yu-yen archer:) Here’s why it’s a (restricted) 2% cash back card. Per the post:

    The only valuable redemption option is applying miles towards travel, since your miles are then valued at $0.01 per mile. But for the sake of completeness, we do mention the other redemption methods.

    Since you earn 2 miles(points) for every dollar you spend, and since these can be applied in the form of statement credits against any travel expenses, it behaves as a so-called “restricted cash-back card” (also noted in the first sentence of the post). Meaning: as long as you do some travel here and there, this card will behave exactly like a 2% cash back card (after all, a statement credit is the same as cash!).

    You were focusing on the gift card redemption table, and yes, you won’t get 2% value if you redeem for gift cards. Per the table in the post, the best you will do is about 0.83 cents per point (and since you earn 2 points per dollar of spend, that’s about 1.66 cents per dollar of spend, still not bad!).

    Hope that makes sense, and thanks for taking the time for the thoughtful post!

    PS As far as ShopDiscover, yes the Escape card also participates; most purchases earn 2 bonus miles per $ of spend, so in effect you would be earning 4 miles per $ of purchases made through ShopDiscover.

  • Steven Monson

    For those of you who consider Amazon gift cards as good as cash, I recently noticed that Discover is now allowing the use of Miles towards all purchases at Amazon. u00a0It appears that when you do this, each mile retains their full %2 cashback return value — just as if you were spending them on travel expenses.