Barclaycard Arrival Plus World Elite Mastercard Sign-Up Bonus Redemption
Kyle and I finally had an opportunity to use most of the sign-up bonus he earned on his Barclaycard Arrival Plus™ World Elite MasterCard®! In a typical year, we travel pretty frequently, but this has not been a typical year for us as we’ve both been preparing to defned our PhDs. We’ve only taken one trip since we each signed up for this card last fall. Thankfully we squeaked in a major travel purchase that helped us use most of Kyle’s sign-up bonus, which I’ll detail below.
BarclayCard Arrival Plus World Elite Mastercard Specifics
The Barclaycard Arrival Plus™ World Elite MasterCard® is the update to the Barclaycard World Arrival Mastercard that I reviewed last fall. When you spend $3,000 (on any type of purchase) in the first 90 days, you get 40,000 miles plus 2 points for every dollar spent.
That’s a very nice sign-up bonus, but the really stellar aspect of this card is in the redemption options. When you put a travel purchase on the card – flights, hotels, rental cars, cruises, and many other categories – you have 120 days to apply your miles at a 1 mile to 1 cent ratio to that purchase. So the $3,000 you spend to get the bonus translates to $460 worth of travel purchases as a statement credit. The redemption process is incredibly easy and there’s basically no way to mess it up (I walk you through it in that post). If you want to redeem for a non-travel purchase, the ratio is 2 miles to 1 cent.
On top of those awesomely flexibly redemption options, you get 10% of the miles you redeem back as a bonus. So if you make another travel purchase after you redeem your sign-up bonus, you’ll have at least $46 as another statement credit! And that iterates for as long as you keep using the card (you need to redeem at least 2,500 miles per transaction).
The Barclaycard Arrival Plus™ World Elite MasterCard® I described above has an annual fee of $89, which is waived in the first year. There is also a no-fee version of the card, the Barclaycard Arrival™ World MasterCard®, which has a 20,000-mile sign-up bonus when you spend only $1,000 in the first 90 days of having the card. That is over a 20% bonus-to-minimum spend ratio! You also get 2 points per dollar spent on travel and dining and 1 point per dollar spent on everything else. The no-fee card has all the same redemption options of the fee card, including the 10% bonus on redeemed miles. That card is a great option if you want to keep the card for longer than a year or don’t typically spend $3,000 in three months on credit cards (we don’t!).
Our Latest Redemption
We used my sign-up bonus on a flight to California last February, knocking the price we paid from $746 down to $321 – and we still have 6,276 miles to use on that account without any additional purchases made!
We went all spring without traveling, but finally an opportunity came. Kyle is giving a talk at a conference in Boston this month, and we had to pay for the registration and travel expenses up front. It’s kind of annoying to shell out that money and wait for the reimbursement after the conference, but we were glad to be able to redeem most of the sign-up bonus from Kyle’s card. Kyle spent $334 on his flight, so we used 33,400 miles to pay for it and got a 3,340-mile redemption bonus. That $334 we freed up can now go into our Travel savings account for our next vacation! We’ve been using the card occasionally, so we still have a bunch of miles left to redeem. Unfortunately, Kyle is staying in a hostel during this conference, which doesn’t appear on the list of qualified travel to get the higher redemption value, but we’ll probably call to check on that after the conference.
We’ll have to find some smaller-value opportunities to redeem the rest of the miles left on both of our cards, like rental cars, trains, buses, taxis, and tourist attractions. If we don’t use up every point, that’s okay – we’ve already gotten over $750 out of this deal. I think we’ll change our cards from the version that has the annual fee to the one that doesn’t before we’re charged the fee for the second year because we can still use the points and get the 10% redemption bonus.
Have you redeemed any credit card rewards recently? What is your travel schedule for this summer?
Filed under: credit cards, travel · Tags: Barclaycard Arrival Plus World Elite Mastercard, redemption bonus, sign-up bonus
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I have this same card and I’m looking forward to redeeming miles for FinCon expenses. I really like that I can cover hotel and rental car. Also, the 10% redemption bonus is a pretty awesome perk. The annual fee was waived for the first year. I haven’t decided yet if the card is worth paying for next year.
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I was thinking of signing up for the United card to pay for my FinCon14 flight, but I think I’ll end up using this card for the flight or the hotel, which should take up the remaining miles. You can’t play the “I want the redemption bonus” game forever! We’ll definitely ask for the fee to be waived and convert if not.
I have the same card – for what it’s worth, when I called to cancel the card after a year and told the rep I didnt want to pay an annual fee, they waived the fee for the next 12 months. I got a new $99 companion certificate in the mail, 10,000 anniversary bonus miles, and an offer for 15,000 bonus miles for a minimum spend of $500 in each of June, July, and August. You can search for “retention offers” in the FlyerTalk forums to get a sense of what you’ll be offered to keep the card, but you can generally count on more rewards for at least another year.
On second inspection, my card is actually a different Barclaycard rewards card…oops! Still worth investigating any rewards offers you may get when you try to cancel, though 🙂
Yeah, I was thinking “I didn’t get a companion pass…” Barclaycard has a lot of good offers out there! We will for sure try to get the annual fee waived before downgrading the card once the first year is up. Thanks for the tip about the forum.
So I’m a bit confused. Since Kyle is getting reimbursed for the trip, wouldn’t it have been better to book the flight using cash with the Barclay card, get the points for it, and then get reimbursed later?
Maybe I didn’t explain myself well. We already had accrued the bonus miles on this card last fall, so he booked his flight with the card, then used the bonus miles to get a statement credit for the amount of the flight. The reimbursement we get in a month or two will go into our Travel account instead of just paying for this flight. Does that make sense?
Ah so the reimbursement will be for the full flight value, but your bonus miles were applied as a statement credit. Makes sense now.
Oh, yeah. That’s one of the benefits of using this retroactive statement credit thing. The flight is still full price, unlike when you use airline miles to pay for one up front. The conference receipts will show the full flight cost so using this bonus is really just moving money around on our end.
You actually have 120 days to redeem against a purchase now – they refreshed the card recently. They also expanded the options that you have to redeem against, so I can now use it for airport cabs for example.
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Hm, maybe we didn’t look closely at the # of days countdown on the redemption screen. Thanks for the info! I’ll update the post. I really like that they expanded the list of eligible travel options – too bad we always commute by car!
I’m actually contemplating keeping this card after the first year is up. Even with the $89 annual fee, it’s looking like I would come out ahead (barely) over using my Fidelity Amex 2% card combined with a 1% visa because of the $ amount I spend that doesn’t accept Amex cards, plus the extra 0.22% back with this card. (The break-even point with my math is at just under $19,000/year in credit card spending, which I am definitely over.) I’m also finding it reasonably easy to redeem the “miles” now that I’ve figured it out.
My perfect one-card system would be a card that meets the following:
1) Visa/MasterCard
2) Chip and PIN
3) No foreign transaction fees
4) 2% cashback on everything (no categories)
5) Easily redeemable
6) No annual fee
7) No maximum on the earnings
8) Free FICO score
9) Trip cancellation insurance, baggage delay insurance, and supplementary rental car insurance
10) Flexible automatic payments (Chase and my credit union both reduce the automatic payment if you make an extra payment)
The Barclaycard Arrival World Elite Mastercard meets all of them except 6) and 10).
I’ll probably still try to see if I can get the annual fee waived after it comes in and if I can, then I’ll definitely keep it and try to raise the credit limit to $20,000. I’m really against annual fees, so I’m quite surprised I’m even considering this! I still have ~5 more months to think it over though.
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You’ve put a good bit of thought into that ideal card! We generally don’t choose cards based on the fringe benefits but they are great when you can use them. I guess since this card is so close to ideal for you it might make sense to pay the annual fee. We certainly don’t spend enough to make it more worthwhile than some of the no-fee cards available. But it is a great one for long-term use if you travel even occasionally.
There’s a lot to love about Arrival Plus, however no card is perfect for everyone. A better option is the Capital One Quicksilver Cash Rewards Credit Card. The Quicksilver earns 1.5% on all purchases and charges no annual fee. You can redeem your rewards for cash back in any amount, any time.
Definitely depends on what you are looking for. We really like cashback cards so the one you mentioned could be a good fit for everyday use. But we weren’t looking to add another card for long-term use, just wanted the sign-up bonus from the Arrival Plus. However, it’s also great for long-term rewards if you travel a lot.
I wouldn’t necessarily say the Capital One card is a better option. As you say, no card is perfect for everyone.
For somebody who travels enough times in a year, travel rewards cards are generally better in terms of value of the tickets to required credit card spending ratio. However, one needs to travel often enough such that their points don’t get devalued by the time they go to try to use them (points are a fiat currency that periodically get devalued!)
For somebody who isn’t looking to travel in the near future, then certainly, the capital one card is a great option. The Fidelity Amex is an even better option, giving you 2% cash back into a Fidelity cash management account, which is required but has no minimums nor fees.
If we sign up for another card for sustained use, it will be the Fidelity Amex. I don’t even know why we haven’t signed up for it yet – just procrastination!
[…] safety net of having the auto-payment on in case we forget to make our payment. So this month, we redeemed the sign-up bonus on one of the cards. We had a $334 charge for a flight and then got a $334 credit for the redemption. When we made […]
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