Link: Barclaycard Arrival PlusTM World Elite MasterCard®

The Barclaycard Arrival PlusTM World Elite MasterCard® gives you 40,000 points after $3000 in purchases within 90 days. That’s worth $400 towards travel. And the card gives you 10% of your points spent on travel back, so another $40 or effectively a $440 signup bonus.

“Travel” is airlines, hotels, cruises, train, and car rentals. So this covers the extra expense for a car on your trip. Or use the points for an airline ticket you’d buy anyway, saving yourself the cash for spending money on your trip. (Or use the points to buy someone else’s ticket, and have them give you the cash.)

This is effectively a 2.2% cash back card, since the card earns 2 “miles” per dollar with each point worth a penny towards travel plus 10% rebated as well. That’s the highest cash back return for all spending across the board of any card I know of, making it the single most valuable ‘travel rebate’ card for everyday use.

It has a $0 annual fee the first year, $89 thereafter, has no foreign currency transaction fees, and gives you complimentary TripIt Pro membership (which normally costs $49).

In addition to the card basics, there are two recent innovations I’ve written about:

• They’ll give you points for your travel stories (whether you’re a cardholder or not, but the points are worth more if you are).

• They’ll now give you your FICO score for free.

And — I’ve just learned — they have a points-earning shopping portal. A few earning examples:

I probably never realized it because the earning options aren’t indexed at EV Reward, the website I use to find rewards opportunities for the purchases I’m going to make online.

Like the Chase online shopping portal, you need to be a cardmember in order to earn points through the website.

Here are the points you can earn on travel sites offering airfare:

There are plenty of hotel chain options providing points back as well.

The idea is that (like the AAdvantage or MileagePlus shopping portal) you start at their site and click on their link to the merchant you’re going to make a purchase from online. And then you earn points credited to your card account for the purchase you’d make anyway at a participating merchant.

It is great, great, great to see:

• Innovation, the introduction of new features and benefits from Barclaycard — they seem to be getting newly aggressive, which is good for consumers.
  
• Competition, that keeps the other card issuers on their toes — it helps prevent devaluations and spurs additional innovations

So a win all the way around, but especially for Barclaycard Arrival PlusTM World Elite MasterCard® cardholders.

(HT: Giddy for Points)

(Note that cards in this post offer credit to me if you’re approved using my links. The opinions, analyses, and evaluations here are mine. The content is not provided or commissioned by American Express, by Chase, by Citibank, US Bank, Bank of America, Barclays or any other company. They have not reviewed, approved or endorsed what I have to say.)

---

You can join the 30,000+ people who see these deals and analysis every day — sign up to receive posts by email (just one e-mail per day) or subscribe to the RSS feed. It’s free. You can also follow me on Twitter for the latest deals. Don’t miss out!