Barclays Arrival Plus Credit Card Review (Discontinued)

Barclays Arrival Plus World Elite MasterCard Review

2019.6 Update: This card is currently unavailable because Barclays is “re-thinking” this brand.

Application Link

  • This card no longer accepts new applications. If you have this legacy credit card, you can still enjoy its original benefits.

Benefits

  1. 70k offer: Enjoy 70,000 bonus miles after spending $5,000 on purchases in the first 90 days.
  2. Earn unlimited 2X miles on every purchase.
  3. NEW – Control Your Card – Instantly secure your accounts by locking your cards with Barclays SecurHold™, plus set transaction limits and block certain purchase categories for you or your authorized users. Available only on the Barclays mobile app.
  4. Book travel your way—no airline, seat or hotel restrictions—and redeem your miles for travel statement credits. The “miles” of Arrival Plus Credit Card cannot be transferred to any airline miles. Instead, 1 mile is worth a fixed 1 cent/mile if you redeem for travel statement credit, spending first and redeeming miles later.
  5. Get 5% miles back to use toward your next redemption, every time you redeem. This increases the value of Arrival Plus Miles to 1.05 cents/mile. So the Arrival Plus Credit Card is actually a 2.1% cash back for everything, and this 60k sign-up bonus is worth about $630!
  6. No foreign transaction fee.
  7. International Chip and PIN for use at self-service chip terminals around the world.
  8. Miles don’t expire as long as your account is open, active and in good standing

Disadvantages

  1. $89 annual fee, waived first year.
  2. The redemption of miles starts from 10,000 miles.

Recommended Application Time

  1. [6/24 Rule] If you have 6 or more new accounts opened in the past 24 months, Barclays will not approve your application on this card, no matter how high your credit score is. The number of new accounts includes all credit card accounts, not only Barclays accounts. It seems for now this is the only Barclays card affected by this rule.
  2. Barclays value the number of recent hard pulls a lot, we recommend you apply when you have less than 6 hard pulls in the past 6 months.
  3. We recommend you apply for this card after you have a credit history of at least one year.

Summary

This card is similar to Capital One Venture: very generous sign-up bonus, 2% cashback on all purchases, no FTF, but there is an annual fee. Compared to Citi Double Cash (DC) which earns 2% cash back for everything and no annual fee, this card has higher sign-up bonus but comes with $59 annual fee, so it’s not a good idea to keep this card for a long time. The sign-up bonus is less than most of the miles and points cards, in my opinion this card is good only for people who don’t want to spend time studying airline miles.

Related Credit Cards

Recommended Downgrade Options

After Applying

  • Click here to check Barclays application status.
  • Barclays reconsideration backdoor number: 866-408-4064. Barclays tends to ask various questions and you must know all the answers about personal information and credit report. Besides, you may get HP again, but will be informed in advance. Therefore, think carefully before calling.

Historical Offers Chart

This card is discontinued in 2019.6.

Application Link

  • This card no longer accepts new applications. If you have this legacy credit card, you can still enjoy its original benefits.

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