I have to say, for Delta medallion flyers, after the Delta Reserve “Airline Travel” card to hold, having and using the Barclays Arrival+ card has become my go-to card. Why? Well as a medallion we have a shot an a free upgrade. As a Diamond I am at about 90% (helps to have the Reserve card too).
As I have shown here earning a nice chunk of Arrival+ points is not all that hard and when buying Delta tickets with either this card OR the other Arrival card (the NON-Plus one) you earn 2x points that are really worth 2.2x points since you get 10% back when you redeem them. As a side point, few go for this other Arrival card as the sign-up bonus is ½ of the Arrival+ card. However, if you buy say $4000 in AMEX gift cards at the 4x bonus you are net after spend, getting 40,000 points 🙂 !
But I digress. Back to TripIt Pro that comes free with the Arrival+. I have to say I am really impressed. Is it the perfect travel tool? No, but just about. Throughout this current trip TripIt Pro has alerted me to gate changes, flight times and so much more much faster than the Delta app alerts. Not just that, having my hotel (and car if I had one) all in one place to pull up is just great.
Since Delta has been persnickety about allowing other companies to access your own personal flight details you have to do a workaround that is very simple. You simple forward a copy of your reservation from the same e-mail that you used to sign up with TripIt pro. Did you delete it or book via a 3rd party? Just go to Delta.com and re-send it to yourself and then forward it to TripIt. Then it is loaded in and tracked. Now if you do have schedule changes you need to update but otherwise there is not much else to do. You will be notified about delays, gate changes and the like. It even warns you to be aware when connection times are getting tight and there could be a risk of misconnecting. Real value when on the go!
I have noticed some hotels do not import properly into the TripIt Pro system but you can still manually add the information to your travel plan you have in place. As already mentioned having all this in one simple place digitally is so sweet.
If you are not taking advantage of this free part of your Arrival+ card I encourage you to sigh up and try. Don’t have an Arrival+ card, then this is just one more perk in an already outstanding travel card. – René
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Editorial Note: Any opinions, analyses, reviews or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any card issuer.
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With TripIt Pro you can actually set it up to automatically scan your email and when it finds a flight, hotel, or car rental confirmation, it automatically imports it into TripIt Pro.
Thanks for doing this blog. I was a DM and am a PM this year.
Chuck
With all of the credit cards offering bonus this and bonus that as long as you spend $XX within the first XXX days, I can’t help but wonder – how much money is being spend by individuals to achieve maximum returns? Some thresholds are as low as $3,000 – some as high as $60,000 so there is some serious $$ being shelled out in the normal daily lives of some. If you own your own business and charge business AND personal expenses, I get it, but if all you buy is “clothing, food and gas”, hitting these limits is going to be really tough. Am I missing something? – Just a thought
@RichmondFlyer – there are many ways to “cycle out” the spend. BlueBird you can run 5k/month. Husband/Wife you are at 10k. There are many other ways for those who wish to take the time to learn and then spend the time to do it. Some are running HUGE numbers across the board. I stay around 15k/month as that works for me.
we get Tripcase through work and the Travelocity business travel services. when we book on the corp web site, it will automatically update a tripcase. if I book outside of Travelocity, I can then forward it to tripcase and it gets captured.
you can add users to your account to get notifications of your travel. So whenever I book something for work, she can see it with her login to tripcase as well.
its decent, but not something I would pay for….
Gregg
Don’t underestimate the free version of TripIt either. Very nice tool in its own right. Depends on your needs.
Does the Amex reserve really make a difference? I wonder if it really breaks any ties?
@Mike – you bet!
The other benefit is the price notification. Over the last 2 years I got an extra $1000 back not including the change fees.