One of the easiest ways to accumulate additional points/miles is by simply doing all your shopping online. For example, Nordstrom recently had a Men’s Half Yearly sale. I went to the store to look around and try things on, took note of the items/sizes I wanted, then came home to buy those items online through Chase’s Ultimate Rewards Mall to get 6x points for my purchase. Free shipping at Nordstrom.com makes this a no-brainer.
Right now the Ultimate Rewards is the most frequented shopping portal, but that’s because Amex did away with their’s some months ago. Most of the airlines and hotels have their own shopping portals but the payouts are generally equal or lower than you can get from Ultimate Rewards. Discover has a great cash back portal, but it’s literally just cash back (which can sometimes be more valuable).
But now Barclay’s Bank has entered the online shopping portal world by introducing Barclaycard RewardsBoost for the Arrival card. It works exactly the same was as other shopping portals – you simply go to the shopping portal, find your store, click the link to be redirected there, and shop as you normally would. Your points will show up in your account some weeks later.
There are over 800 retailers available according to the website, and it looks like the big ones are all there. The payouts may or may not be better than Ultimate Rewards, but I’m actually glad I have to check now. More options might mean a little extra work to figure out where to click through, but it also means I’m ensuring I get the best deal possible.
I received the the notification because I added the Barclay’s Arrival World MasterCard (affiliate link) to my wallet in my last set of applications. It looks like there are many separate portals (note – you might need to use private browsing for this link), one for each of the different cards, including the US Airways MasterCard. I did a quick check of a few retailers and the earning rate seems to be the same for both the Arrival and US Airways shopping portals.
The Arrival World MasterCard is the current best “cash back” option since you earn 2.2 cents back (on travel redemptions) per $1 spent, plus the signup bonus of $444. Remember, you still earn all loyalty points/miles by redeeming with this option. Earning extra points would be huge for this card and program, and I’m definitely going to be looking into this a little further to see if there are any great values. I’ve already started to put together a mini list of experiments to see if I can really take advantage of the portal.
As a reminder, don’t spend any extra money meeting your minimum spend requirements – only buy what you normally would buy. But make sure you click through an online shopping portal first to earn the extra points whenever you can. I like using evreward.com to find the best portal to click through.
Now get out there and earn some points!
this is actually a big deal. any idea if you have to be a cardholder for this?
According to the FAQ section, yes, you need to have one of their credit cards before gaining access to the portal.
It doesn’t look like there’s any great deals available or anything that I’d rather purchase from here than UR. I’d be curious to know what your experiements are since it sounds like you’ve found something worthwhile.
When you redeem for travel using the Arrival card is it just taken off your bill? Or do they write you a check or something? Don’t understand how the cash back thing works with them.
MileValue actually just wrote a detailed explanation of how to redeem these points: http://milevalue.com/how-to-redeem-the-444-sign-up-bonus-on-the-arrival-world-mastercard/
It’s been around for a while, at least since I got the NFL card in 2012.
It wasn’t available for the Arrival card before though, right? Assuming that they added this new since the Arrival card is relatively new.
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