tl;dr You can only redeem Barclay+ Arrival points against a travel cost if you have enough points to redeem against the entire cost, even if you only want to zap away part of it.
I’m trying to get back into writing, and I figure short and sweet is the way to ease back into things. I’m about to get rid of my Barclay Arrival+ card and ran into a situation that I hadn’t before.
I had a $114.60 cent charge that I wanted to zap away with my Arrival+ miles. I knew that since the changes last year, the minimum travel redemption was $100. In the past, I’d always been offered the option of redeeming miles for a $100 credit or for the full credit of the airline charge.
So I was surprised when I couldn’t redeem 10,000 of my 10,500 remaining Arrival+ points against the cost of that $114 ticket! The redemption was grayed out and I was told I needed enough points to redeem the entire ticket.
One day and $500 gift card later, I had enough points to redeem for the entire ticket. When I went to redeem, I was still given the option to redeem for only $100! Silly. Anyway, I redeemed all my points and I will just live with the 600 orphaned points when I cancel in a week or two.
I guess I had never run into the issue before because I always had enough points to redeem for my total costs. Only when I was drawing down did I finally run into this issue.
I’m sure this might help someone out there!
In my opinion the Arrival Plus is an overrated card.
Similar thoughts have led me to get rid of it, hence my minor discovery!
Today I noticed some hotels.com charges aren’t even showing up as eligible purchases. If they changed something else in the back end to “enhance” it I’ll be pulling out scissors as well.
I just redeemed $100 for a $200 purchase last week. I don’t know why you had that problem.
Barclays hates me?! I dunno, now I’m annoyed! I could have bought that gift card with something else. Should have taken a picture but wasn’t originally planning on writing
Wait did you have more than 20k points in account? Or just the 10k you redeemed
Just do a product change to a basic Arrival card. You keep all your points. No annual fee. Redemptions start at $25. Once you drain your points, then cancel. We’ve done that on all 3 of our household Arrival World Elite accounts over the past 3 months.