Earning Miles with Barclaycard Travel Community
The Barclaycard Travel Community provides an opportunity to earn participation miles by contributing stories, photos and travel advice to the Community web site. You can also earn miles by commenting on other posts and by receiving positive reviews from other community members.
Barclaycard Arrival™ Cardmembers can have their miles from the Travel Community linked to their Arrival card and redeem their miles for travel rewards. If you are not a cardmember you can redeem for Amazon e-certificates.
Signing up is easy, as is posting stories, photos and comments. The site also includes travel related discussion threads which you can search. Completing a basic profile about yourself tells other community members where you’re from and how you like to travel. You earn 500 Participation Miles for completing your profile.
The site sends email alerts for each action that earns you miles, as well as a monthly newsletter and summary of your Participation Miles activity. The miles you’ve earned to date also show on your travel profile when you sign in.
I completed the signup and found it to be a simple process. There is a section in your profile called “My Travels”. Here you can list all of the places where you have traveled, indicate which are the places that you know well, and identify the places that you would like to travel to in the future. I found creating these lists more cumbersome that actually submitting a story with photos. There is a limit to the number of places that you can list under “Places I travel to”. However, they do not state that anywhere. I found the information in a discussion thread after being frustrated by adding cities that did not appear in the list even though they appeared to be accepted when I listed them.
Once you have registered, it is easy to accumulate miles by checking into the site every few days and contributing to the site or commenting on the contributions of others.
The site is probably most valuable for those who are Barclaycard Arrival™ Cardmembers. I do not have the Arrival card but will continue to visit and contribute to the Barclaycard Travel Community to keep current on how it evolves.
According to Barclaycard US, Barclaycard Arrival is the only consumer travel rewards card that allows cardmembers to redeem their miles to fly on any airline, at any time – with no blackout dates or seat restrictions – and get 10% of their miles back when they redeem for travel. The card also offers miles earning power, a complimentary subscription to TripIt® Pro mobile travel organizer and access to the Barclaycard Travel Community.
They are currently offering a 40,000 mile sign-up bonus and waiving the $89 annual fee for the first year.
