Barclays changes its credit card policy again – good news on the IHG and Hilton cards

There was much grating of teeth among Head for Points readers before Christmas when Barclaycard made some draconian changes to its credit card policy.

It decided that you could not have two Barclays-issued cards at the same time.

Even worse, if you cancelled your existing Barclays-issued card, you had to wait six months before you could get another.

The second policy was, frankly, crazy.  If you had a ‘no rewards’ card from Barclays and, after reading HfP, you decided to change to a rewards card, you had to discount the Barclays options.  You were obliged to go to MBNA, Lloyds or Amex instead.

Barclaycard issues two pretty good hotel branded credit cards – the Hilton HHonors Platinum Visa (read my Hilton Visa review here – the sign-up bonus is fantastic) and the two IHG Rewards Club Visa cards (read my reviews here and here).

I am sure that Hilton and IHG were also very unhappy.  There are lots of people out there who hold a Barclaycard and they were effectively banned from taking out the Hilton and IHG products.  This won’t have gone down well.

I had heard unconfirmed reports over the last two weeks that Barclays had changed its policy.  This has now been confirmed in writing to a HfP reader.  He was told:

You were originally declined by ourselves on the basis you already have an existing Barclaycard. Within the time you applied, our policy changed which allows our customers to hold a Barclaycard and a partnership card such as the Hilton Honours [sic] card.

So, the new rule seems to be that you can hold a Barclays-branded card AND the Hilton or IHG card at the same time.

What you CANNOT do is hold the Hilton and IHG cards at the same time.  To be honest, I doubt that Hilton or IHG is too concerned about this as it makes their existing customer base ‘stickier’.

The Barclaycard website has not been updated to reflect this change and still says that you can only apply if:

You do not already have a credit card provided by us, including one of our partner cards.  Our partnership cards include Hilton HHonors, Intercontinental Hotels Group, Littlewoods and Caravan Club.

Next question – when is Barclaycard going to fix its website so that you can apply for the Hilton and IHG cards via the tablet site?  At the moment you can only apply for Barclaycard-branded cards via an iPad.

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Want to earn more points from credit cards? – April 2024 update

If you are looking to apply for a new credit card, here are our top recommendations based on the current sign-up bonuses.

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You can see our full directory of all UK cards which earn airline or hotel points here. Here are the best of the other deals currently available.

Earning miles and points from small business cards

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