When Barclay announced the rebranding of their annual fee card to the Barclay Arrival Plus, they also announced that this would become a World Elite card rather than just World. This gives cardholders access to some additional benefits (mostly discounts on first and business class travel).
[Read: Guide to MasterCard Benefits]
It wasn’t made clear who would be upgraded to World Elite & who would stay at World. Once reports of new applicants all getting the World Elite starting coming through (even with low credit limits and low credit scores), people with the existing World cards that weren’t scheduled for an upgrade began to complain. I was surprised by the amount of complaints I saw, as I don’t particularly value the additional benefits as useful. That said it’s always disappointing when companies shit on their existing customer base in a push for new applications. You can read through a lot of the complaints in this FlyerTalk thread.
It looks like the complaints have gotten through and Barclay will now be upgrading existing customers to World Elite status. You can read the official announcement on the Barclay Travel Community blog post by clicking here. Here is a summary of what will be happening:
- All cardholders who received their card before December 2013 are currently having their upgrade processed and should receive their World Elite card soon
- All cardholders who received their card during or after December 2013 will not have their card upgraded immediately, but will receive an upgrade in the future. This includes people who received a new card due to the target breach.
Of course your account must be open and in good standing to receive the upgrade. If you’ve received a new card after December 2013 it seems like you can still receive an upgrade, but you’ll need to make a complaint to get it upgraded. This is because Barclay is claiming that they aren’t processing these upgrades due to it being inconvenient for the cardholders (an upgrade to World Elite usually involves a change of credit card number as well).
It’s nice to see Barclay making this change or at least making their rules more well understood. That said it’s been disappointing to see their handling of this incident. I don’t particularly care about World Elite status, but they obviously know it’s a draw card otherwise they wouldn’t have added it to the card. It’s also worth remember that MasterCard will not cover fraudulent PIN transactions under their fraud liability scheme until October of this year.
