Pre Trip Report or How I Embraced Credit Card Rewards and Learned to Love Them

Walt Disney World Deals & Money
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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!

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@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.”

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Yes, I may have gone into the weeds on my explanation there. :wink:

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.

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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! :smiley:

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:

Angel%20Devil
Angel Devil.gif850×479 453 KB

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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.

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FYI: the $5k spend requirement is over 90 days. (Whew, 30 would be painful.)

They did just up the bonus points this year to 60K points, but also increased the $3K spend I had last year to the $5K now.

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Yeah. Well, even over 90 days, $5000 would be tough to pull off unless I timed it just right. I could do it if, for example, I charged all our groceries for 3 months (which would bring us to about $3000 or so). But I’d still have to have another $2000 in purchases.

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Yep, that’s why I have been waiting on starting it up myself, looking for some bigger necessary expenses to go through.

Wonderfully, my daughter is going to do her part by getting braces soon. :smiley:

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Come to think of it, if I sign up in December 2019, then I could charge the entire DVC rental cost to the card and have most of the $5000 taken care of.

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For the credit card rewards: if you have a big spend that does not take credit cards, there is a service called Plastiq. You pay them with your credit card and they charge you a fee and then they send a cheque on your behalf to pay the mortgage, ect. I tried it to pay electricity (just to see how well the service works) and it was pretty easy. I would not do it for everything (as it has fee) but it a good way to get those spendings for bonuses.

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For the barclay, they say “redeem for gift cards”…is Disney one of those gift cards? I ask because for Captial One, it most certainly was not.

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You know, I don’t think so but can’t say so definitively.

I did do a spreadsheety analysis of the various ways to redeem their rewards, and do recall most of the various return rates were poor compared to the straight travel redemption. I think the gift cards cost twice as many miles for the same $ value than the straight travel redemption.

So, we just planned to use them on travel redemption on the park tickets via UT and hotel stays for maximum return.

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cool ok. For Captial One, it was a 1:1 transfer for gift cards, good to know that Barclay isn’t like that. Thanks!

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First of all, thank you for this post! I am now dipping my toes into the world of credit card churning!! (Paying everything off each month, of course) Anyway, I was wondering if you know the answer to this as I could not find it in the small print of the documents I got…If I add my husband as an authorized user on my Barclay Arrival Plus, will that make him ineligible to get the 70K bonus if he eventually gets his own card? The fine print just says that a cardholder is ineligible for future rewards. Thanks!

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I can’t speak to any changes since I last investigated, of course, but historically being an authorized user does not make you ineligible to get your own card and reap the bonus rewards.

When we got our BarclayCard Arrivals, I made my wife an authorized user on mine and then got hers soon after, no issues at all. On our Chase Disney Visas, we’ve both always been authorized users on each other’s card every time we’ve swapped them out. (We’re due for our 3rd round of Disney Visa bonuses this year on my wife’s card!)

For reference, here’s a Points Guy post on the topic (from 2016.)

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Thanks! Speaking of the Disney Visas, I just signed up a couple of months ago, and when I got my bonus it was directly applied as a statement credit. Not a big deal, I just opened a savings account and credited it with the same amount. I also can’t seem to get the referral to work. It tells me it is not available :frowning: