Discover is offering 5% bonus for gas and ground transportation, the latter defined as "local and suburban commuter transportation, including ferries; passenger railways; taxicabs, limousines and rental cars; charter/tour bus lines"
It should work on train tickets in Italy, shouldn't it?
The trick is this, does Trenitalia take Discover Card?
Edit- I'll answer my own question. If you buy from www.italiarail.com, they do!
Trenitalia and most Italian businesses don't take Discover. Discover's fine print might place some limits on the offer, since they can't necessarily be expected to recognize every travel company around the world. Neither should be an issue if you book train tickets through Rail Europe in the US, but the 5% savings would just offset their slightly padded exchange rate.
And the second trick is, if you can use it there, how will the transaction be coded? Every credit card transaction has type a code that identifies the merchant type. It's the presence of this code that gets the transaction to report for the cashback bonus. I would not be confident of a foreign entity coding the same way.
But even if it does - you are still paying a 3% foreign transaction fee to use the card, so you are only gaining 2% cashback. Get a CapitalOne Mastercard, no foreign transaction fee and you can get this in either a 1.25 or 1.5 % cashback variety, without worrying about whether it will code right or whether it can even be used, or whether you exceed the bonus limit for the period. It's been reported here before that Discover is of limited acceptance overseas.
Why not call Discover and ask the question, or email them so you may have a written response? I have never been able to use Discover to purchase train tickets IN Italy, if that is what your last question asks, or is that about the bonus cashback offer?
