On our recent trip to Italy this summer, my goal was to have every portion of the trip that constituted travel to be paid with using rewards. After all, we had already gotten the flights on British Airways Avios saving, $4,700 and our 4 night stay in Milan was paid for using 120,000 World Of Hyatt points saving close to $3,000. I had a lot of Capital One miles due to Rob securing a Captital One Spark Miles Card with a 200,000 mile bonus last year (what?!?!) and will use those to offset (via a statement credit) our 3 night stay in Lake Como. That will pretty much eat up all of our Capital One Miles.
However, I also had Barclaycard Arrival miles that I hadn’t used yet in both mine and Rob’s account. I intended to use these miles to offset all of our other travel in Italy, like our taxis, car services, ferry rides, trains, etc. In addition, we took a car service to and from the airport here in New York, I even wanted to use my Barclaycard Arrival miles for those rides.
In the end, I was somewhat successful. I was able to use my miles as travel statement credits, but only for charges that started at 10,000 miles for $100. I forgot this part about the $100 minimum. So for all of our charges that were less than $100, I was unable to use my miles to get a statement credit.
Oh well. I find this annoying and feel now that the Capital One cards (that have the same earning structure at 2x miles per $1) are a bit more superior as they do not have a minimum in terms of how much you need to spend per travel charge in order to be able to redeem your rewards as an offset on your statement.
I still have a nice balance of Arrival Miles. I will make sure I only use the card for some very expensive travel charges!