I have an executive membership so I get rewards every year. I may think about this. Do you know how it works in store? Would it be executive points plus visa?
I’m not familiar with the executive membership, but from what I understand, you’d essentially be “double-dipping” on the rewards. You’d get the 2% reward on Costco purchases for being an executive member and then also get the 2% reward on the Visa. The timing of the two rewards would be different, but you’d get them eventually.
Looking at the executive membership, you don’t get the executive rewards on gas purchases, but the Costco Visa gives you 4% back on gas purchases.
http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/faqs-citi-costco-anywhere-visa-card.php
Oh, and I also have the Discover IT Card as well; they have rotating groups of categories that give you a 5% bonus. Right now, it’s restaurants. And for the first year, they are going to double my cash back…so essentially, I’ll be earning 10% on restaurants now until the end of September.
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Thanks so much! Great detailed post. I churned a few for my upcoming trip. Sure helps! I’m $1400 to the good. Do you ever listen to the Backside of Magic podcast? They have lots of great ideas on how to save including sign up bonuses, discounts, and buying Disney gift cards at Target with the “red card” for a 5% discount.
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You’re welcome!
Yes, I do listen to them! They have some really good tips on there. I even sent them a link and info for my AP upgrade - discount tickets spreadsheet in case they might find it useful.
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Thought I’d post some additional roundup:
I agree with mikeandkelli that the Visa is not the best for maximum rewards. That’s why we focused on our Amex, but there’s a few places we frequent that don’t take them, so that’s pretty much when we flip over to the Disney Visa. (It happens that the cheapest same price credit/cash gas station near my office is non-Amex, so that’s how our rewards really jumped over 3 years.)
An aside on another Visa: While there are no Disney rewards points connected to it, if you are an LL Bean lover, their Visa has no annual fee and they give you LL Bean vouchers from accumulated purchases. We keep that one because it gives you free shipping on orders AND returns (which happens a LOT with my wife’s orders.) I find LL Bean clothes for the most part are my Go To place for business casual and casual casual.
An Aside aside: I’ve gotten to the point in life where I break out in hives at the mall. Which reminds me of the time I took my then 5 year old daughter Christmas shopping. When we got back to the car and were all buckled in she asked, “Daddy, How do you spell ‘shopping’?” I spelled it out and a minute later her tiny hand reached around the driver’s seat and handed me this:
Back to the rewards topic, One other piece of advice I might give:
If you are trying to get rewards on various cards for an upcoming trip you would probably like to minimize the amount you spend on each card so you can spread the spending around between them.
In that case, I would suggest you map out the timing on a calendar for using the Barclays (or other) cards so you can do that efficiently.
When getting rewards on the Disney Visa, the timing is probably not as important since you spends the $500 bucks, you gets the rewards. It is not a terrifically high amount to spend so for many of us that spend would go quickly, so your main concern is leaving enough lead time for that $200 gift card reward to show up before your trip.
For the Barclay Arrival MC, you have 3 months to spend $3,000. If you are doing that for 2 cards, as I did with my wife, I didn’t want to get both cards at the same time and be struggling to spend (and pay off!) $6,000 all at once unless if was for regular expenses. (We don’t carry balances on any cards - and if AT ALL possible you should do the same or you’ll be eating up your rewards by paying the banks interest.) Of course, my commuting car decided to help me out and come up with an $1,800 repair for me to do.
Barclay TIP: It is good to know, by the way, that I called Barclay when I received our first Arrival MC to see when the 3 month time period started - I assumed it was from the date of activation - but the customer service rep told me the clock started on the day of approval! So, remember to take that into account.
Now, to minimize the spending on those Arrival MasterCards: Since we are using those rewards for travel reimbursement statement credits, in a perfect world you would spend just enough before your trip to get you close to the $3,000 and then would use the card for hotel or other travel expense that would get you over the finish line to the spending amount.
You then have 120 days to use your rewards points on that travel expense. Because our trip was relatively close, I wasn’t sure how long it would take to get the cards, didn’t realize the 3 month clock started right at card approval, and we were planning to earn these rewards on 2 cards sequentially, we ended up having to hit our $3,000 on both cards well before the trip to earn the 50,000 points on each.
So, we’re going to end up using my Barclay card for at least another $500 on the CBR hotel charge to get my larger $500 travel reimbursement, and one of our one-night hotel stays on the drive down for my 2nd $100 reimbursement.
On my wife’s card, we used the UT tickets to get her large reimbursement already, and will use the hotel on the drive home to get her smaller reimbursement.
Not really a big deal for us to use the Barclay cards more than the minimum $3,000 spend, but just wanted to point out that more efficiencies can be had if you time it right.
Since we have so many Disney rewards to use on site, the original plan was to use those to pay for the CBR hotel and some food. Thus, we were originally going to buy a pair of UT park tickets with each Barclay card to get the large reimbursements. Then we found that Amex was offering their own one-time $30 statement credit for a UT ticket purchase, so we bought one pair with Amex. Couldn’t pass up another free $30!
Even with no other Disney trip on the horizon after this upcoming one, we shouldn’t have any issue with using up our Disney rewards GCs, since we are paying for food out of pocket.
After all of that - guess I just wanted to say in this post: be sure to make at least a simple roadmap of how you are going to use the rewards cards to maximize things. Once I did that and made the simple rewards table I used in the posts above I realized how I could squeeze out those extra rewards without much effort.
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I’d like to add some info here that some may find useful when trying to refer friends and family for Disney Chase Visa cards.
It has come up a few times on Lines chat that if you use the option on the Chase referral page to send referrals via email, the referral takes up to a week to appear - and in my own experience sometimes they never show up at all!
(Yes, I checked spam, Henry. I’m an IT guy. I eat spam for breakfast. Well, not literally.)
There is a better and immediate way to get the referral link: instead of using the Share via Email option, use either the Facebook or Twitter options to share. And, Don’t Panic! You don’t actually have to tweeter it or Facebookify it.
You can just copy the referral link, save it to a file, email it to your friends and family, or get it tattooed on the back of your neck so people in standby behind you can jot it down and apply while they wait 368 minutes for Flight of Passage.
Here’s a quick succession of screen shots with the steps involved.
First, open a browser and go to this Chase catch-all referral page (should work for most Chase cards, not just the Disney Visa):
https://www.chase.com/referafriend/catch-all
(Click Continue when you have filled this form out.)
(and no, My name is not Smith and I have never been in a California teen TV show.)
On the next page:
The email and address form will turn into a “Share on…” button.
Wave bye, bye to Chase.
Copy the link in the tweet - you do not need to be logged in to Tweeter.
(The numbers in my example are changed and will not work. Go copy your own, copy cat.)
Step 6: PROFIT.
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I was wondering how I could get the link. I didn’t see a way on the SW email link so thanks! I didn’t read back but are you leaving soon?
I’m debating on whether to “spend” my Chase points for this trip or to save them to apply towards a SW companion pass. If I understand correctly you need 110K SW points in one year to get a companion pass. Once you have the pass it’s good for that entire year and the following calendar year. Maybe there’s a catch. That seems too easy.
I haven’t looked into the Southwest card in detail - we’re driving every trip since we also visit family in Miami, and the flight plus rental is way too much.
But, from what I know the SW card companion pass works the way you said - does seem easy, but lots of people doing it.
BTW, I’m sitting in a CBR room while I type this, hitting AK tomorrow for 8AM RD!
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I’ll be anxious to read the full-on TR! Have fun!
Wanted to post an interim follow up to the Barclay rewards redemption part of this process:
For my wife’s card, we purchased tickets for 2 people at Undercover Tourist and got the $500 travel reimbursement as shown above. On the drive down we used her Barclay for our 1 night stay on the way, then got the additional $100 travel reimbursement, so her rewards are all done.
The plan was then to use my Barclay card for $500 of the Caribbean Beach hotel charge, and then again for the 1 night hotel stay on the drive back home. When we checked into CBR, I did not realize that they charged all of the hotel itself immediately to my Barclay card.
I thought that they charged your card when it hit the $1,500 threshold - Guess I misunderstood and they only use the threshold for the weekly magic band room charges.
In any case, when I went down to the front desk on Wednesday to make sure they charged my card for the 3 days, I found out all of the hotel room charges were placed on my Barclay Arrival card. But, the CMs were able to quickly reverse some of the charges to my Barclay card and then use my Disney Rewards to pay the remainder. So, no harm no foul.
Now that I am home, here is the scorecard on the Barclay:
You can see the original $835.86 charge, then the ($323.36) credit - so the net CBR charge to the Barclay card is about $512. Then I have the $105.83 charge at the Hampton Inn on the way home. That all looks great.
However, when I went to redeem the travel reimbursements there is a hiccup. As of now, Barclay’s Rewards still thinks I charged $835, and the redemption options are slightly different:
As mentioned in the previous post, I expected to redeem 50,000 points for $500 reimbursement, then 10,000 for another $100. However, my lowest option here is 52,500 points!
I’ll gladly take another $25, thank you very much - but I suspect that when the statement cycle closes and the CBR credit kicks in, those rewards will drop back to where I expected them to be. I am wary of redeeming them now, so called Barclay to see what they thought. The representative had to put me on hold to confer with the Gods of MasterCard, and she agreed it should all wash out after the cycle.
I just wanted to post this out there to make people aware that credits may change how the redemption options are presented. We shall see how it goes in a week or so!
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Super informative and definitely going to have to try this next time we plan a trip!!! Also, crazy jealous of your math skills (I hate numbers lol) and pretty spreadsheet skills!
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A Possibly Final Follow Up to My Barclay Rewards Redemption Epic
Previously on How I Embraced Credit Card Rewards and Learned to Love Them
As you can see in my previous post, I had an unexpected hitch when going to redeem my travel credit.
I wanted CBR to charge about $500 to my Barclay MasterCard so I could use rewards for that amount in a travel reimbursement.
However, CBR charged the whole enchilada of hotel charges all at once for an $835 charge. I then asked at the front desk if they could reverse some of that Barclay MC charge to get me closer to $500 and then use my Disney Rewards cards to pay the balance.
They obliged and put a ($323) credit on my card, so total Barclay MC charge was $512.
But, when I went to redeem my $500 travel reimbursement, Barclay Rewards still thought I charged $835.
The smallest amount of rewards I could redeem was $525.
While I could work it so I had enough rewards to redeem more points (I’ll explain that part later), I was leery of claiming a $525 travel reimbursement on what was really a $513 net charge and then finding out later I’d have a headache trying to get things ironed out.
Now that you’re caught up…
I had called Barclay for help and the representative suggested I waited for my statement to close and I would see the two transactions from CBR consolidated into a single net charge of about $512. in the Barclay Rewards Redemption table.
I had no balance due this month since the only charges on this card were from CBR and a Hampton Inn hotel just before the statement went out, so I did just what she suggested.
However, now that the statement closed for the month I found that Barclay Rewards did NOT consolidate the charges and still thinks I have an $835 charge out there eligible for reimbursement. When I checked to see how many additional actual rewards points ended up on my card this month based on those charges I found that Barclay DID get the new rewards right based on the charges - I did not get any extra.
The Good News
It looks like this hitch is working in my favor and could even be used as a weird rewards hack if you find you’ve spent more on your card and have some extra rewards available after going through the same steps I outlined above.
This morning I called Barclay again just to make sure I wasn’t going to fall into some Rewards Abyss™. The representative this time said that Rewards will NOT consolidate - it can’t tell the credit is related to the original charge, so it will continue to think I have an $835 reimbursable hotel charge out there. (I find that odd from an accounting and auditing standpoint.)
Again, as I mentioned in the previous post: the minimum number of rewards the system would let me redeem was $525 worth. I was going to ask if I could still redeem less ($500 worth) and ask her to do it for me since the web site wouldn’t - but then I thought, “Hmm, I like money. And an extra $25 is money.”
So I just went for it - I redeemed 52,500 points for a $525 travel reimbursement.
The only issue is that using the extra 2,500 points on this first reimbursement leaves me with 9,085 rewards points, which is less than the 10,000 points I need to to get that additional $100 reimbursement against my Hampton Inn stay.
Two Options
So now, in order to have enough rewards for that final travel reimbursement…
(1.) I can spend an additional $485 on my MasterCard over the next few months to get me over the 10,000 point threshold. Or,
(B.) I can go back to the Barclay Travel Community, post 6 or 7 stories (using my new Disney and Miami photos!) and earn the points I need without spending any more money on this MasterCard.
Last week I preemptively opted for Plan B and wrote several posts on the Travel Community. Those Community Rewards post to the community within a day or two, and then they roll onto your card rewards on the 1st of the month (unless it is on a weekend.) So, I’m going to wait patiently and then go back in for my final $100 reimbursement, for a total of $625 reimbursed on my card (and $600 on my wife’s.)
(By the way: It is a great feeling to see I have $642 outstanding balance on my credit card and know I’ll only have to pay them $17 next month to zero it all out!)
One Last Important Thing I Learned
Now that we are back from our trip, we’re looking ahead to future ones - in addition to Disney World, I’m dreaming we can somehow get enough together to take trips over to Ireland and the Czech Republic to visit cousins I keep in touch with, and to see our family towns.
So, I’ve started checking into how I can make this whole rewards thing happen again, possibly multiple times. More good news: If you Use The Google Luke you can find a multitude of articles about getting the same sign-up bonus on cards multiple times!
Some cards have more restrictive policies than others - looks like Amex allows you a sign-up bonus once per card type per person, forever. I had mentioned before I took advantage of the Chase 2 year turnaround on sign up bonuses for this trip.
If reports online are correct, it looks like with Barclay’s you can actually get the bonus again only around 6 to 8 months later! That’s crazy talk right there, but good crazy talk.
Obviously I’ll be delving into my research and trying it out if I can.
One Final Redundant Comment
Credit card stuff like this can affect your credit score - do your homework before jumping in!
From what I can tell, as people who carry no balance month to month, dropping and adding cards should continue to have little effect on our FICO. We have only dropped a few FICO points since the start of the process, and are still way up in the excellent zone. (Which, coincidentally is the name of my new 80’s cover band.)
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Hi @JJT,
Thanks for this info! I had a question for you… Can you use the rewards to help pay for the initial 3K if the initial 3K included travel expenses? Or is it really only after the initial 3K, you can spend a new amount and get rewards on that. I tried to see if you had explained it somewhere, and I apologize if you did, but I couldn’t find it.
Thanks!
@JJT I thought that here you were saying it could be used on the 3K, but I wasn’t sure if you were just giving a suggestion on how to reach the 3K:
“Now, to minimize the spending on those Arrival MasterCards: Since we are using those rewards for travel reimbursement statement credits, in a perfect world you would spend just enough before your trip to get you close to the $3,000 and then would use the card for hotel or other travel expense that would get you over the finish line to the spending amount.
You then have 120 days to use your rewards points on that travel expense. Because our trip was relatively close, I wasn’t sure how long it would take to get the cards, didn’t realize the 3 month clock started right at card approval, and we were planning to earn these rewards on 2 cards sequentially, we ended up having to hit our $3,000 on both cards well before the trip to earn the 50,000 points on each.”
Yes, I may have gone into the weeds on my explanation there. 
Sure: Your initial $3K spend to get the bonus can be the travel expenses you intend to use the points on.
My detailed info there was trying to explain that if you didn’t want to use the card for anything except to get this bonus, you’d time it so you hit the $3K spending with the vacation charges. Then you can use the bonus points on the travel reimbursement when you get back.
Since we were doing it with 2 cards (one for me and one for my wife) and didn’t expect to spend $6k total in only 3 months, we got the cards one at a time well before the trip. None of the pre-trip charges were travel related, so the only down side was that we had to spend more than $3K on the card, since we had to use the cards on the trip for hotel charges.
(Wasn’t really a down side at all, though. Got more points for the extra spending!)
In a perfect world, I could have at least timed the 2nd card so that we hit the $3K on the trip. But, since I wasn’t sure how long cards would take to arrive and was the first time I was doing this, I just erred on the side of caution and got the cards as soon as I could.
Anyone reading this in July, 2018: looks like Barclaycard Arrival has upped their bonus points to 60,000 now! Of course, they also upped the initial spend required to $5,000. (First year annual fee waived.)
Still, even with larger spend, is a fine reward to use on travel - I was able to squeeze more than $600 out of the rewards on both my wife and my own card last year. So, using the same technique I outlined above with the additional reward and spend points, I’d expect one should be able to make those points worth somewhere around $750 per card.
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Can I just say that I am SO DELIGHTED you’re going back to Disney because your trip reports are THE BEST? I already can’t wait to read them. (Please say you’re writing trip reports??)
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Thank you! 
Right now I’m finishing up my plan to hopefully take another family trip next summer - and use this whole rewards tactic again so I can get us APs for very little money (or free), then we can expand it into another trip the following year.
Our kids have various things they do in summer that may make it hard to squeeze in the 2 trips in a single 12-month AP year, though.
I am still considering doing a crazy 1 day trip this summer to make me eligible for the Moms Panel application again. But, while I’ve gotten my estimate for the trip down to around $400 for everything, that’s still a decent amount of money to throw out there for what is a decidedly super long shot at getting on that panel.
So, I keep talking myself into and out of doing it. This is me all day every day right now:
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Saw this linked from another thread and oh how I wish I’d seen this a year ago!
I’m fairly new to the cashback rewards game. I thought I was doing pretty good with a Citi Doublecash card (2% on everything, no categories, no limits, as long as I pay it off every month) and an Amex that gives something like 6% on groceries, up to $6000 a year. ALL of our food expenses at WDW are going to be covered by rewards.
But I’d never considered doing the referral thing with my wife; we could basically double our 6% grocery reward each year plus finagle our way into double sign-up bonuses.
Have bookmarked this thread and its links for further study. Too late to impact my Nov 2018 vacation, but there’s always next year…
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Based on the requirement of spending $5000 on the Barclay card in the first 30 days, I’ll have to wait to sign up for that one until we are ready for some significant purchase. I generally don’t get cards with annual fees.
However, I did see that Barclay offers a Choice Privileges card. We are already Choice members, since we tend to use Choice hotels most often (Comfort Suites). So, it might be worth getting that one instead. Not quite as nice of benefits, but there is no annual fee and we’d end up spending money on hotels anyhow.