This week Barclaycard shared details of their new Uber Visa credit card.
Bottom-line it’s a really strong no annual fee card with 4% back on restaurants, cell phone protection, and an annual rebate for online streaming services. Although it doesn’t seem to carry significant benefits traveling with Uber.
In the New York Times coverage of the card they note that applying for the card will be embedded into Uber though.
Uber customers will be able to apply for the card within the Uber app, with most of the personal information needed for the credit card application pulled directly from their Uber profile. If approved, the card can be immediately loaded into a customers’ mobile wallet. The goal, Uber’s David Richter said, is to have people applying, getting approved, loading the card and paying for the ride with the card all while the customer is being taken to their destination.
More significantly to me, they noted “Barclays and Uber said point transfers to airlines will be coming in 2018.”
Doctor of Credit wondered if this is misreporting.
Obviously there is no guarantee that this will happen and it’s also possible NYTimes is misreporting this (similar to Time reporting no fees for Apple Pay’s p2p).
However Barclaycard confirms to me that “we are exploring other travel redemption options for 2018, like point transfers, that could be used for Uber and some of our other card products.”
So there’s nothing to announce today in terms of which cards will offer points transfers, or which programs points will transfer to. I’d imagine that this would be a feature not just for Uber but perhaps for their Arrival+ product or a new premium product in the Arrival family. This could be huge.
Can’t believe i bought your clickbait title again. I wish Boardingarea could have a function to block certain bloggers.
Chase and other banks have mostly locked up on some reasonably exclusive partner agreements
I’d be surprised if they bagged some great airline/hotel points partners of any kind
How different is this card from the hundreds of merchant-cobranded cards launched over the decades? Did all those merchants push “further into the financial services sphere” with their cobranded cards?
@J — how on earth is this clickbait? The substance of the post matches the title exactly. Barclaycard is confirming plans to offer a transferrable points currency next year. The Barclaycard quote is even in the snippet that goes out via RSS, email and on the front page of the blog before you click.
@J – This blog admittedly has had some clickbait articles. This is not one of them.
Barclays has relationships currently with AA and Jetblue. You could see Jetblue being a transfer partner (they already are with a number of card issuers). But if Citi couldn’t secure AA, I doubt Barclays could.
As @777Globalmilehound said, a lot of these relationships are locked up so I’d be skeptical and the comment Barclays gave to Gary leaves a lot of wiggle room.