Barclaycard Arrival is one of our favorite travel credit cards because of its very generous bonus of 40,000 miles after only $3,000 in spending during your first three months as a cardholder.

Miles aren’t redeemed toward any particular airline or hotel chain and don’t transfer to airline or hotel programs. Rather, each mile is worth 1¢ in travel credit toward any travel expenses charged to your Arrival card.

The card comes with a 10% travel redemption bonus that redeposits 10% of all used miles back into your account for immediate use toward other travel expenses. Because the Arrival card offers 2x miles on all purchases, that means starting off with a minimum of $460 in free travel after meeting the minimum spend requirement that’s actually worth $510 in free travel after taking the 10% bonus into account.

We’ve covered Arrival previously in our card review and explained how Arrival is an outstanding option for negating travel expenses like award flight taxes and fees and for redemptions on cheap hotel stays and flights where the number of points required by other programs would mean poor value.

Arrival effectively rewards you for being good at finding cheap travel deals. But how easy is it to redeem travel credit toward expenses? That’s what we set out to discover recently.

How To Redeem Arrival Miles Toward Travel Credits

We recently signed up for Arrival and earned the sign-up bonus as well as a few thousand additional miles. Once the points posted, we logged in to our account with Barclays and found the redemption link prominently displayed on our account home page.

From here, we were shown a list of recent transactions that were eligible for the travel credit. Chief among these were our expenses from our recent trip to Las Vegas.

We billed all of our meals and periphery expenses at MGM properties to our room at MGM Grand, effectively lumping in expenses that might not otherwise have been considered an eligible travel expense with the cost of our room for the week.

Note that each of these travel expenses were actually made while meeting our minimum spend requirement, so even though the minimum spend requirement may be $3,000 for Arrival, in reality as little as $2,540 in purchases + $460 in travel charges you intend to use miles to offset can meet this requirement!

After selecting our stay at MGM Grand for a travel credit redemption, we were offered a number of options for how many points to apply toward the trip. It’s possible to not only wipe out an entire charge, but any amount of a charge in $25 increments so long as the charge is at least $25 and you have at least 2,500 points in your account.

We opted to knock out the whole charge, but didn’t realize that points redemptions round up to the nearest dollar! That meant using 36,200 for a $361.25 redemption, meaning we missed out on 75 points’ worth of value. Still, that’s quite a small quibble given how easy it was to knock out a large travel bill!

Once we completed the redemption, we were pleased to see the 10% travel redemption bonus take effect immediately:

Overall, it’s hard to think of how the process of applying travel credit to travel expenses with the Arrival card could be any easier. If you haven’t given this card a look yet, we’d urge you to do so.

Arrival helps support PointsAway and offers a tremendous value that rewards bargain hunters and makes redemptions easy!