BarclayCard Arrival Plus vs Chase Sapphire Preferred
Similar But Not Really......
Both the Barclaycard Arrival Plus and Chase Sapphire Preferred are similar in the sense that they are both travel rewards cards with annual fees. They both have no foreign transaction fees and both come with Chip Technology embedded into the card. But that is really where the similarities end. They are really very different types of travel card.
Differences
The first major difference between the cards is how they allow card members to earn points. The Arrival card allows you to earn double points (2X) for every dollar that you spend on the card. That's right - it's everything. In contrast, the Chase Sapphire Preferred allows you to earn double points for travel and dining expenses and one point per dollar for other regular expense. Hence, Barclays is a straight 2% card when it comes to earning points whereas the Sapphire Preferred only allows you to earn double points on some expenses.
As mentioned earlier, both cards allow you to redeem points for travel. But how you redeem them has more subtleties and nuances to them than meets the eye. Let's start with travel. For the Arrival card, you can book your travel with anyone. That means that it can be directly with the airlines, hotels, travel aggregators and even offline travel agents. After you book your travel items, you have 120 days to redeem your points for these spending. This is how it works. Let's say you spend $100 on a train ticket (considered travel). By spending $100, you would have earned 200 points. To use your points for the $100, you need to use 10,000 points. You have to redeem the 10,000 points within 120 days. Once that is redeemed, you get a statement credit equivalent to $100. In addition, you get 10% of the points you use back into your account. In this example, you get 1000 points back into your account. If you work out the math, it works out that with earning 2X, with the 10% bonus on points redemption and the points you 'earn' when you spend on travel, you will get a fixed 2.27% return on the Arrival Card.
For the Sapphire Preferred, you can use your points in a few ways. Firstly, you can also use it like Barclays. That means you either book your travel or use the Chase Ultimate Rewards Travel Portal and book your travel items. When you use the travel portal, you can either pay with your credit card, use points or a combination of points and cash. The redemption ratio is 1% (ie 10,000 points gets you $100 in value). Unlike Barclays, there is no 10% redemption bonus. Because you only earn 2X points on travel and dining, the exactly value of your points cannot be determined unless you know your exact spending and how many points you earned for your spending. Regardless, using points this way gets you less than the 2.27% that the Arrival card offers.
However, the Chase Sapphire Preferred card allows card members to transfer points to their airline and hotel partners. Their airline partners include United, SouthWest, Korean Air, British Airways and Singapore Airlines. Typically, the best bang for your buck in using Chase points is through their miles transfers. And the best value in using these miles appears to be redeeming them for first or business class tickets abroad where you can get upwards of 4% in value.
For non-travel rewards, Chase has a more comprehensive reward system where you can redeem your points for gift cards and many merchandise at 1%. This is slightly better than Barclays where the rewards are less than 1% for non-travel rewards.
Even though both cards have Chip Technology, the Arrival card comes out slightly ahead because it uses Chip and Pin technology rather than the Chip and Signature that Chase uses. Having the Chip and Pin will allow you to use the card in places like European train stations to buy tickets where they require a PIN number. So in this regard, Barclays comes out slight ahead.
Barclays also provides many of their cards (including the Arrival) with access to their TransUnion Fico score for free. This feature is not available to Chase card members.
Both of these cards have annual fee. The Arrival Card's fee is $89 (waived for the first year) while the Sapphire Preferred is $95. Though the fees are different, it is not such a huge difference.
If You Are a Frequent Flyer Expert And Hacker....
After looking at both cards, we can ascertain that the key difference lies in the fact that you can transfer Chase Sapphire points to frequent flyer partners whereas you cannot do that for the Arrival. If you are a frequent flyer on any of Chase partners and know the ins and outs of the game and are able to book business or first class tickets with huge value, then Chase would be the better choice. I suspect that the person who would prefer Chase will be either a single or couple (with no kids), flexible travel schedule and have the personality to exploit the rules and nuances of difference flyer programs
Get the Arrival If.....
The Arrival would be more suitable to the person who is either starting out of playing the travel rewards game, or simply is flying domestic and always getting cheap airfares via comparing prices on aggregators. The other advantage of Barclays (and fixed value credit card programs) is that you are not subjected to blackout dates and other restrictions of frequent flyer programs.