Barclay Announces Negative Changes To Earning Points With The Barclay Travel Community

On April 11th, Barclay snuck a few changes into the way you earn miles with their Barclay Travel Community. You used to earn 200 miles per travel story you shared (minimum of 50 words and requires a picture), you now earn only 150 miles. You still receive 10 miles per kudos (similar to a facebook like) you receive and 500 miles for completing your profile.

To offset these changes they’ve added another way to earn miles, for every “detail” you add to your travel stories you earn an additional 10 miles. A detail is a restaurant, hotel or attraction, you must add this on the map and then also rate it to earn the 10 miles. This means it’s still possible to earn 200 miles per story, but it’ll now take a bit longer to do so.

[Read: Our Full Review On The Barclay Travel Community]

The biggest change they’ve made is that you can now only receive miles for 5 stories per city (maximum of 1,000 miles per city). This is largely due to some people writing hundreds of useless stories for their home city to earn miles quickly.

Redeeming Your Barclay Travel Miles

Application Link for Barclay Arrival
Our Full Review Of The Arrival Card

Once you’ve earn miles on the Travel community they are automatically turned into Amazon gift cards at a rate of 2,500 miles per $5 (0.2¢ per mile) when you reach 2,500 miles. This is of course unless you have an open Barclay Arrival card and have it linked to the Travel community, if this is the case your miles are automatically transferred to the card. In which case you’ll be able to redeem them as statement credit at a rate of $12.5 per 2,500 miles (0.5¢ per mile) for non travel expenses and $25 per 2,500 miles (1¢ per mile) for travel expenses. 

This means that you now earn $1.5 per travel story submitted, rather than the $2 you were able to earn before. It’ll be interesting to see if Barclay continues to downgrade the amount you can earn, or if this is enough to keep those abusing the system at bay. Either way, we suggest you start submitting stories now if you want to earn a decent amount.

Hat tip to Mommy Points