Back in 2018, Barclays relaunched the Arrival+ card and offered a 70,000 point bonus to new members. The Arrival+ card was Barclays’ purest travel card available. You earned 2 “points” for everything charged to the card and could use your points to erase any “travel” expense charged to the card.
No worrying about if you’re booking directly or using a third-party OTA. You’d be able to erase any expense with your points. There was also no ability to gain oversized value, besides earning a 5% rebate with each redemption. With the prevalence of no-annual-fee cards offering 2% cashback, there was a limited market for a $95 card which only allowed you to use your points to pay for travel expenses. Barclays subsequently stopped new applications for the Arrival+ card in June 2019.
There’s little practical reason to keep my Arrival+ card and continue to pay the $89 annual fee but I’ve been reluctant to cancel the card. Since we have a JetBlue Plus card, we’d still have a relationship with Barclays, which may be important if we ever want to apply for another card from the bank.
I could easily charge a travel expense to the card and “cash-out” the remaining points. However, I choose to keep the card open because Barclays occasionally sends offers that are worth more than the annual fee.
Barclays spending offers can sometimes be a bit cryptic but this one is straightforward. I can earn an additional 3X points (on top of the usual 2X points) for our grocery store, drug store and restaurant purchases until the end of June 2022. Unfortunately, we received this offer by email at the beginning of May, a full 1/3 of the way through the offer’s duration.
Still, I enrolled our Arrival+ card and can earn $60 in points from everyday spending over the next 2 months. That covers most of the annual fee for the card and knowing Barclays, this is not going to be the only spending offer they’ll issue before I have to pay the annual fee again.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m waiting for to cancel the Arrival+ card once Barclays stops issuing these bonus offers. It’s very apparent they don’t have much interest in the Arrival+ product or its cardholders. I’m hoping they’ll say the card is being discontinued but there’s probably an issue about what to do with the points people have stored in their accounts that is keeping them from making such a drastic move.
Until then, I’ll keep using the 5X point offers I get every 3-6 months which makes keeping the card a breakeven proposition.
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