A barred preferential arrangement is a preferential arrangement, onto which in-between the blocks of the preferential arrangement a number of identical bars are inserted. We offer a generalisation of barred preferential arrangements by making use of the generalised Stirling numbers proposed by Hsu and Shiue (1998). We discuss how these generalised barred preferential arrangements offer a unified combinatorial interpretation of geometric polynomials. We also discuss asymptotic properties of these numbers.