The Barclaycard Arrival Plus is one of the best “fixed-value” travel credit cards on the market. Although the sign-up bonus recently dropped back to 40,000 points, you’ll still get at least $400 toward travel just by meeting the spending requirement. Many people, including myself, have had success churning this card in the past, despite the following verbiage in the fine print:
However, it seems that Barclays is cracking down to prevent abuse of this card’s generous sign-up bonus. According to Doctor of Credit, for this card specifically, Barclays may have implemented a rule similar to Chase’s 5/24. If you’ve opened a certain amount of new cards in the past 24 months, you won’t be approved for the Barclaycard Arrival Plus. Based on DoC’s data points, it’s looking like this is either a 5/24 or 6/24 situation.
It’s a real bummer because you used to be able to churn this card once or twice a year, which made for an easy $800-$1,000, depending on the sign-up bonus.
Final Thoughts
With the introduction of a new 5/24 or 6/24 rule for the Barclaycard Arrival Plus, we can be sure that Barclays is aware of churners trying to take advantage of the sign-up bonuses. I suspect that Barclays is more apt to apply this sort of rule to their own line of cards rather than co-branded ones like the American Airlines Aviator Red. However, we can never be sure. I, for one, am highly unlikely to churn this card again since I don’t plan on resetting to 5/24 any time soon. So I guess their rule worked…
