Barclaycard Upromise World MasterCard: 10% back at many hotel chains, office supply stores, Target, and Best Buy

Barclaycard is (re)launching the Upromise World MasterCard®, and it has one very nice feature to it: 10% off a variety of online merchants, including major hotel chains, office supply stores, Walgreens, Target, and Best Buy. We’ll get to that in a moment.

First, the other details of the card offer. For the most part, there’s not much to see. The $50 sign-up bonus is pretty weak. The card claims 4% cash back at “thousands of restaurants”, and that’s true–you can see the list here–but it’s not as widespread as it sounds and if you’re already getting miles from the airline dining programs, you’d have to cancel and enroll in the Upromise dining program since they’re all part of Rewards Network.

There’s 3% cash back at ExxonMobil gas stations–but there are already cards offering 3% or more on gas without restricting the brand.

There’s 2% back at movie theaters, but not even the most ardent cinephile sees enough movies to make 2% back at the movies worth switching cards for.

And that brings us to the final marketing bullet point, the one worth a closer look: you can get 5% bonus cash back when you use the Upromise online shopping portal with your Upromise card. That’s 5% above and beyond the portal bonus, and it consists of your 1% standard cash back plus 4% bonus cash back.

This can get a little confusing, but not all of the Upromise portal merchants are eligible for the bonus cash. You can find the card’s bonus-eligible merchants here. For the travel hackers reading this, there’s pretty good coverage on hotels:

• Candlewood Suites Hotels
• Choice Hotels
• Clarion Hotels
• Comfort Inn
• Comfort Suites
• Country Inns & Suites
• Crowne Plaza Hotels & Resorts
• Econo Lodge
• Extended Stay Hotels
• Fairmont Hotels
• Holiday Inn Express Hotels
• Holiday Inn Hotels & Resorts
• Hotel Indigo Hotels
• InterContinental Hotels
• Le Meridien
• MainStay Suites
• Quality Inn
• Radisson
• Rodeway Inn
• Sheraton
• Sleep Inn
• Staybridge Suites Hotels
• W Hotels
• Westin

You can get 10% cash back on all of those. There are a couple of other 10%-eligible merchants which may or may not be of interest to you: Best Buy, Office Depot, Office Max, Staples, and Walgreens. Again, keep in mind this is for online shopping only.

Another merchant of note: Target appears on the card-eligible list at 5%, so it seems you could get 10% back at Target with this card, though we’re obliged to point out you could also do that by pair the Target RedCard with the Upromise portal. According to CashBackHolic.com, the Discover and TopCashBack portals also offer 5% back at Target.

We don’t do enough with portals or online shopping to make this card a no-brainer, but we’re considering it. If you’re not into that scene, this card wouldn’t be a good fit for you.

We called Barclaycard to see if we could convert an old Barclaycard rewards card to a Upromise card, but they said we have to apply for new credit to open the Upromise card. If anybody has any experience with this card or with getting Upromise to follow through on bonuses from its portal, please chime in below, as information on this card is rather sparse.