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Pete Snaps

Capital One VentureOne and Discover It Miles are both solid entry-level travel credit cards. 

But which one is better? 

With no airline or hotel restrictions, both cards are more flexible than most higher reward cards out there.   

And with no annual fee, these cards are excellent long-term cards.

Let’s look at the benefits head to head. 

What are Points Worth?

Points are worth 1 cent for both the Discover It Miles card and the VentureOne card.

Which Card Offers the Most Points per Dollar?

The Discover It Miles Travel Card comes out ahead of the Capital One VentureOne card.

You will earn 1.5 points per dollar spent with Discover (1.5 cents), while the Capital One VentureOne rate is 1.25 points per dollar (1.25 cents).  

This means for ALL spending, the Discover card earns 0.25 more points per dollar. 

Winner: Discover It Miles

Travel Bonus Rewards

The Capital One VentureOne card pulls ahead with specific travel bonus opportunities.

These opportunities include 5x points earned per dollar spent for flights, hotels, and rental cars booked through the Capital One Travel portal. 

While this perk only comes when users book through the Capital One portal and does not also count towards specific hotel or airline rewards programs, it is accompanied by price drop protection and a price match guarantee. 

Read more on that here: Is Capital One VentureOne a Good Card?

Price Match Guarantee – essentially ensures a price match within 24 hours after booking through the Capital One Travel Portal. If you find a better deal in 24 hours, simply call Capital One to submit a price match claim.

Price Drop Protection – is Capital One’s way of saying they believe in their flight prediction tool. They claim it is 95% accurate in monitoring flight prices 24/7 and telling users when the best time is to book. If you book a flight based on the prediction tool’s ‘book now’ recommendation, Capital One will continue to monitor prices. If the prices drop after you book they’ll give users a refund up to a certain max amount. This amount is specified when you book. 

See specifics here.

Discover It Miles, on the other hand, is simply a flat 1.5 points per dollar rate across the board. There are no bonus rewards for booking travel a certain way. It is truly a flat-rate reward. 

Winner: Capital One VentureOne   

Which Card Has the Best Sign-on Bonus?

Discover It Miles

The Discover It Miles card offers users a unique, unlimited point-for-point matching bonus in the first year of use. 

This is an excellent offer for a no-annual-fee card. 

If you spent 20,000 points in the first year, Discover would match it and award another 20,000 points by the end of the year, totaling 40,000 points. 

40,000 points = $400 in rewards. 

This is essentially earning 3x points per dollar spent in the first year. 

The fact that this bonus is unlimited makes this card a great choice if you have a lot of large purchases to make–like doctor bills or building/furnishing a new home, etc. 

Capital One VentureOne

The VentureOne card offers a 20,000 sign-on bonus when users spend a minimum of $500 dollars in the first 3 months of opening the card. 

This minimum spend is extremely easy to hit and a great bonus for lower spenders. 

20,000 points = $200 in rewards. 

A Couple of Caveats 

A couple of caveats to discuss before we award a winner. 

The Capital One bonus is awarded within a couple of weeks after spending and paying off $500 using the card, while the Discover bonus isn’t received until after 12 months of using and paying off the card. 

This gives the VentureOne card the edge if you need points fast.   

On another note, the Discover card has no minimum sign-on bonus. This means that while it is an unlimited bonus, the benefit is directly related to matching how much you spend in the first year.  

Bottom Line

If you will spend at least $7,000+ in 12 months, the Discover It Miles card bonus will beat the Capital One VentureOne card ($7,000 x 1.5 = 10,500 points x 2 = 21,000 total points). 

However, if your spending is really low, it may be difficult to spend the $6,670 ($6,670 x 1.5 = 10,005 points x 2 = 20,010 year-end points) needed to get 10,000 points in the first year to be able to hit the same guaranteed 20,000 bonus as the Capital One VentureOne card.  

Thinking about the bonus offers in terms of minimum spending can be a helpful snapshot.  

$500 spent in three months = 20,000 ($200) points with Capital One VentureOne. 

$6,670 spent in 12 months = 10,005 points + 10,005 matching for 20,010 points with Discover It Miles. 

If you have any kind of bills, you’ll easily be able to spend more than enough to make the Discover card bonus the better choice. 

Or, you can sign up using my link today and get a $100 statement credit after just one use of the card in the first 3 months of signing up. This benefit is half the bonus of the Capital One card. 

Sign-on Bonus Winner

In the end, the Discover It Miles card has a better sign-on bonus. 

It is unlimited and will double at the end of the year. 

Not to mention, after the bonus you will build points at a 0.25 faster rate (a quarter of a cent) than the Capital One card for all regular spending. 

Capital One awards 1.25 points per dollar.

Discover It Miles awards 1.5 points per dollar.

However, if you are a student or someone just starting out without a ton of bills or expenses, the $500 dollars in 3 months minimum spend will guarantee a $200 bonus you can use right after meeting that minimum spend and paying it off completely. 

While the Capital One VentureOne bonus wins with ease and speed, the Discover card offers a better bonus overall.  

Minimum Spend Winner: Capital One 

Speed of Points Awarded: Capital One 

Overall Winner: Discover 

How to Redeem Points? 

Redeem points with the Discover It Miles card by making a purchase, paying it off, and using your account points to erase those charges. You can do this for any type of purchase.

Simply log in to the app, scroll to your miles balance, click ‘redeem’, and choose how you want to be reimbursed:

• Travel Credit 
• Cash
• Pay with Rewards
• Pay Your Bill

Redeem points with Capital One VentureOne by logging into your app, clicking ‘View Current Balance’, and selecting ‘Rewards Miles’.

This will bring you to a screen to select how you’d like to redeem points:

• Book a Trip
• Convert Rewards
• Cover Travel Purchases 
• Redeem with PayPal
• Shop with Amazon
• Get Gift Cards
• Redeem for Cash

Discover It Miles allows you to redeem your full points value no matter how you choose to redeem them. Also, during the Pandemic, Discover extended travel purchases to include purchases like restaurants and gas stations. 

Capital One will allow you to redeem points in a variety of ways, but only purchases coded as travel will give you the full benefit. 

Which Card is More Flexible? 

Discover It Miles is more flexible with redemptions than the Capital One VentureOne card.

With redemption options like: 

• Travel Credit 
• Cash
• Pay with Rewards 

Discover pulls WAY ahead in this department. This is due to the points value remaining the same across all redemption options. 

40,000 bonus points will be $400 in bonus points no matter how you choose to use them, whether for travel or to simply help pay bills by redeeming them for statement credits. Points never expire and the value stays the same across all redemption options. 

Capital One VentureOne on the other hand, allows users to redeem points for travel at the standard, full-value rate of 1 cent each, but if you decide to instead redeem points for cash back or gift cards, your points are suddenly worth less, 0.5 cents with cash back and 0.8 cents with gift cards. 

In this sense, the VentureOne card is the most beneficial as a travel card and will benefit users the best when it comes to redeeming travel purchases like hotels, flights, rental cars, etc. 

Obviously, it’s a travel card and that’s what it’s supposed to do, but say you hit hard times, like during the pandemic, and really want to use your points to reimburse groceries since you can’t travel anyway and your hours have been cut, you will have to take a points loss to do so. 

The Discover card is the clear winner here. 

Points are earned at a flat rate and redeemed at the same value no matter how you choose to spend them. This flexibility makes the Discover card an excellent long-term card to sign up for and keep. 

Especially as this tactic can help your credit score stay stable. 

Winner: Discover

What If I Don’t Fly, Which Card is Best for Road Trips?

This is a great question. 

For people who don’t enjoy flying, or for times (like the pandemic) when flying is not really advisable, it is important to understand the benefits your rewards cards offer to road-tripping to your vacation destinations.  

Capital One VentureOne

Capital One VenutreOne offers great benefits for renting cars for 5x points through the Capital One travel portal. 

It’s important to note that while the VentureOne card covers car rentals, it does not recognize gas as a travel charge. Travel charges are recognized based on how merchandise is coded. 

It just so happens that gas is not coded as a specific travel purchase. 

So, if you are road-tripping with your own vehicle and not renting a car, the VentureOne card won’t be any help. 

The Capital One VantureOne is a great benefit to vacation rentals like Airbnb and Beach condos, but when it comes to gas for road-tripping, it isn’t much help. 

Discover It Miles 

While gas was not technically coded as a travel purchase worthy of points eraser status with Discover in the beginning, Discover did update the travel perks to apply to gas during the pandemic.

Also, since the card does allow users to use all points at full value no matter how you redeem them, gas redemption was always on the table, technically. 

Since you are not stuck with just erasing past travel purchases, you can instead use your points as a statement credit or as cash back at full point value. 

Once again, the Discover It Miles card beats out the Capital One Venture One as a card that can benefit anything from your gas on road trips to your groceries. 

Winner: Discover It Miles

What Card is More Reliable and Widely Accepted?

Capital One is the more widely accepted credit card compared to the Discover card. 

The VentureOne card is a Visa, which is the most widely accepted type of credit card.

Discover on the other hand is a little less accepted. In the beginning, it was less accepted than it is today.

Today, Discover is 99% accepted anywhere you go. The times you have to worry a little more is with going abroad. You may run into instances where your card is denied. 

This was true when I first backpacked Europe in 2013, but my last trip to Italy in 2019 proved to be a breeze using Discover.  

Winner: Capital One VentureOne

Real Life Example 

With credit cards, things are always changing. 

This post is based on my specific experience using both cards for 7 years now. 

It is also based on the current deals and perks offered in April 2022. 

Rewards credit cards are excellent ways to get ahead with free flights and vacation perks, but realize the rewards and offers change periodically over the years (as you’d expect and desire).

When I first signed up for both cards, my strategy was to use the Discover It Miles card for the first 12 months to bank my matching bonus and then switch to using the Capital One VentureOne card after that first year.

This strategy was based on the fact that the VentureOne card had a 1.25 points accrual rate and the Discover It Miles card had a 1-point accrual rate at the time. 

This is what I recall and what I based my card usage on for all these years without ever checking back to make sure I didn’t misread something.

Only recently when I dug the card out of the dusty sock drawer to make sure I was using it enough to keep the account open (and to check for points I could use), I realized the points rate was 1.5 points per dollar.

I’m not entirely sure if I misread the points rates all those years ago or if Discover updated the points accrual amount somewhere in between Europe 2013 and one recurring bill and my sock drawer.

This fact makes the Discover card my personal top pick for a long-term entry-level travel card. 

Not only are the points bonus better, but it acquires points (that are also more flexible to use) at a faster rate. 

The Capital One VetureOne card has a great list of perks, but it is not enough from the overall holistic standpoint to beat out the Discover It Miles card.