It looks like the Barclaycard Arrival Plus® World Elite Mastercard® is being pulled at some point soon for the foreseeable future. UPDATE: The card is no longer available. If you are in the market for a new card or have been on the fence on applying for this particular card, now is the time to do so. This is also the best welcome offer we’ve seen for the card with a 70,000 bonus miles — worth a fixed $700 towards travel. The minimum spend is $5,000 in the first 90 days — here is a quick tip how to quickly meet the requirement. With this card the annual fee is also waived for the first year, and then $89 a year.
Earning Miles
With this card, you’ll earn 2x miles on every single purchase. Not only that, when you go to redeem your miles, you’ll receive a 5% rebate back on your points. Ultimately this means you are earning 2.11% back on all purchases. This is great card to use on your everyday purchases that do not carry category bonuses.
Using Your Miles
To redeem the miles earned from the Barclaycard Arrival Plus® World Elite Mastercard®, all you do is make your travel related purchase on the card (as if you normally would with any credit card), and once the charge hits your card, you go online and redeem the miles for that purchase. This means you do not need to worry about award availability for flights or hotels or blackout dates. You are just redeeming your miles at a fixed 1 mile = 1 cent. Then within a few weeks after redeeming your points, you’ll receive the 5% rebate on your redemption.
You can use your points on most travel related purchases, including: airfare, hotels, car rentals, cruises, trains, taxis, uber/lyft, etc. You also do not need to purchase directly from the hotel or airline (although there are sometimes benefits of doing this), and can use your miles for third party hotel sites such as hotels.com, expedia.com, etc. or even travel agencies and tour groups. These miles are great to earn for extra travel expenses where you typically cannot use your hotel points or airline miles.
For example, I recently used my points earned from this card to pay for a ski hotel reserved with Expedia. In the Northeast, using hotel points right near a ski mountain is hard to come by, so this was the perfect opportunity.
The one restriction for using your miles is that you must redeem for a minimum $100 purchase, but on the flip side, you can also redeem your points for only a portion of the travel expense. Let’s say you purchased a $1,000 flight, but only have 80,000 miles in your account. You can redeem your miles to cover $800 of the flight and then you’ll just be paying $200 out of pocket.
Overall…
Having a flexible point and miles card, such as the Barclaycard Arrival Plus® World Elite Mastercard® is definitely recommended and this definitely one of the better offers on the table right now. Once you put the $5,000 minimum spend on the card, that will net you 70,000 miles plus an additional 3,500 miles when you go to redeem them (due to the 5% rebate benefit). Effectively you are looking at a $735 valuation from this card offer.
This is definitely a great card to apply for and one that I highly recommend for those looking for free travel.
Learn more about the Barclaycard Arrival Credit Card:
- My Recent Credit Card Approval: 70,000 Points with the Barclaycard Arrival Plus
- Best Ever 70,000 Miles with Barclaycard Arrival Plus!
- Redeeming Your 70,000 Miles from the Barclaycard Arrival Plus Best Ever Offer
- Top 8 Questions for the Barclaycard Arrival Plus Card
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Is it worth to keep this card after the annual fee hit? If not, is it better to cancel the card or downgrade to the no annual fee card..