If you didn’t already known, Barclay Arrival has their own travel community where you can earn miles for posting travel reviews. It’s open to both card members and non card members alike. Here is our review:
Contents
How To Earn Miles
Complete your profile: 500 Miles (2 minutes)
Fill in the following information and you’ll receive 500 miles:
- City & State
- One Travel Interest
- Travel Style & Companion
- 5 Cities Added To Your 5 Cities Map
Post A Travel Story: 150 miles (2-5+ minutes)
Each story requires the following to be accepted:
- At least one picture
- At least 50 words
Add A Detail To Your Travel Story: 10 Miles (1-2 minutes)
- Add a location: attraction, restaurant or hotel to your travel story
- Rate that attraction, restaurant or hotel
Receive Kudos: 10 miles (no time required)
- A kudo is basically a facebook like for the Barclay Arrival travel community, you’ll receive 10 miles every time somebody kudos one of your travel stories.
Collecting Badges: Unknown amount of miles (unknown amount of time taken)
- There are over 10 badges you can earn in the Barclay Arrival Travel Community, each gives you a point bonus. Usually the point bonus is about 250 points. Badges are as follows:
- Beach Bum:Â Earn this badge when you write 5 or more stories on beach, shore or sun travel.
- Trial Blazer:Â Earn this badge when you write 5 or more stories on active adventures.
- Urbanite:Â Earn this badge when you write 5 or more stories on city tourism and urban getaways.
- On the road again:Â Earn this badge when you write 5 or more stories about business travel.
- Gaming guru:Â Earn this badge when you write 5 or more stories on casinos and table games.
- Family fun:Â Earn this badge when you write 5 or more stories about family get-aways.
- Backstage pass:Â Earn this badge when you write 5 or more stories related to concerts, festivals and events.
- Cupid:Â Earn this badge when you write 5 or more stories about romantic get-aways.
- Inner light:Â Earn this badge when you write 5 or more stories about spiritual travels.
- All-star:Â Earn this badge when you write 5 or more stories about playing sports during your travels.
- “Fan”atic:Â Earn this badge when you write 5 or more stories on attending sporting events.
- Tastebud:Â Earn this badge when you write 5 or more stories on food or dining travel.
- Zen master:Â Earn this badge when you write 5 or more stories about spas, yoga or relaxing retreats.
- Culture vulture:Â Earn this badge when you write 5 or more stories on history and culture travel experiences.
- Wanderlust:Â Earn this badge when you write 5 or more stories about your road trips or driving adventures.
- Pride:Â Earn this badge when you write 5 or more stories on LGBT travel experiences.
- Prolific travel writer:Â Earn this badge as the third level of storytelling by writing 20 stories.
- You really like me:Â Earn this badge as the first level for getting 5 story kudos.
- Travel tips guru:Â Earn this badge as the third level for getting 50 story kudos.
- Getting to know you:Â Earn this badge for completing details of your profile. (500 points, you’ll receive this badge for filling out the information needed above. You receive 500 points total, not 500 points for filling it out and another for this badge)
How Much Are Miles Worth?
The value of points depends if you are an Arrival card holder or not.
Arrival Card Holders
Application Link for Barclay Arrival
Our Full Review Of The Arrival Card
If you have an Arrival Card the first thing you need to do is to link the card, to do so following these instructions:
- Click your profile in top right corner
- Click “Link Your Travel Community Profile Now”
- Follow the prompts
Once you’ve linked the card and your arrival profile, miles will automatically be deposited into your Arrival Milage account and can be redeemed as normal
- 1 mile = 1¢ when redeeming for statement credit on travel expenses, you also receive a 10% mile refund when redeeming for travel statement credit. Making 1 mile worth 1.1¢
- 1 mile = 0.5¢ when redeeming for statement credit on non travel expenses
Non-Arrival Card Holders
If you don’t have an arrival card linked, you’ll receive a $5 amazon gift card every time you reach a total of 2,500 miles (0.2¢ per mile).
How Long Do The Miles Take To Appear?
It seems that all points take one day to appear in your Barclay Arrival Travel Account, I don’t currently have an arrival card so I am unsure how long it takes for them to be transferred to your card. As of the 21st of March, I’ll have enough points for the Amazon gift card and will update with how long that takes to appear in my account.
| Activity | Date Completed | Date Points Received |
|---|---|---|
| Complete Profile | 19th March, 2014 | Â 20th March, 2014 |
| Submitted Travel Story | 19th March, 2014 | Â 20th March, 2014 |
| Kudo Received | 19th March, 2014 | Â 20th March, 2014 |
| Badge Received | 19th March, 2014 | Â 20th March, 2014 |
Affiliate Program
At the moment there is no affiliate program, so you will not receive any additional miles if you get friends and family members to sign up. Hopefully Barclay will add one soon.
Our Verdict
If you have an Arrival card, this is probably worth doing depending on how much you value your time. It’s an easy way to fill a couple of minutes whilst waiting for a flight, bus or train and the rewards are high enough (without the requirements being too tricky) that it’s worth it. Your only earning a maximum of $2.2 (plus any additional miles you earn from badge bonuses) per travel review, but you should easily be able to do 20+ per hour ($66 per hour).
The only downside is that it’s not possible to link any of your existing social networks (e.g Facebook) so it’s hard for friends to view my reviews. Because of this, I’ll probably continue to post my reviews on tripadvisor, even though they don’t offer any point bonus. I’ve written 10 test reviews on the Barclay Arrival Travel community to see how strict they are in approving things and how many natural Kudos I can expect per post. I doubt I’ll dedicate time to sitting down and writing reviews, but I will probably write some reviews when I have a few minutes of spare time and an internet connection.
It’d be handy if they allowed an offline mode that I could submit new posts to and then have it bulk upload once I have internet connection again. That way I could fill up some of the long haul hours on an international flight with no internet.
Maybe you’ll find a post or two there that you find helpful and give it a Kudo or two!
HolidayCheck is another similar site, but they only pay for hotel reviews and pay less per review (100-150 points depending on the frequent flyer program you redeem with). They also require proof you stayed at the location (booking confirmation or receipt). It’ll be interesting to see if more of these sites continue to pop up in the future.
As of jan 29 2021 this is dead. They took down the barclay arrival travel community permanently. https://www.mypointslife.com/2021/02/barclay-travel-community-closure.html
A few changes to the program I’ve noted:
Word count minimum = 100 (up from 50)
“Up to 5 travel stories can be posted for an individual City, State, Country by a Member ever”
-curious if/how this is enforced. Seems a bit vague – can I do 5 in one city, but more in the same state? Country?
— terms
Members will earn Miles for the following activities:
• Members will earn 150 miles for each travel story that is posted on the Site. The description must contain at least 100 words and at least 1 unique photo related to the story.
• Up to five (5) travel stories can be posted for an individual City, State, Country by a Member ever.
• Up to one hundred (100) travel stories can be posted by a Member per Month.
• Each detail added to a travel story using the map will earn 10 miles per detail. Members can add up to 25 travel details per travel story.
• Every time the story that is authored by a member is kudoed by another member, the member will receive 10 miles
• Completing a profile will earn each Member 500 miles; a profile is considered complete when the following information is added: 1) the City and State in which the member lives 2) At least one travel interest is selected 3) at least one travel companion is selected 4) at least 1 travel style is selected 5) at least 5 cities are added to the “My travels” map
• Barclaycard, at its sole discretion, may also provide members miles for other activities
• Barclaycard, at its sole discretion, can change or remove these miles values and activities at any time, without warning
• Barclaycard, at its sole discretion, reserves the right to pull down travel stories that do not adhere to the community guidelines or are not good faith efforts to provide quality content for Users of the Site.
• Barclaycard may terminate your use of the Site, at its sole discretion, for behavior inconsistent with these Terms and Conditions for Miles Participation or for any conduct that it considers to be inappropriate without warning.