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The Bilt Mastercard® is one of the best new rewards cards introduced in the past several years.
It’s unique because you can use it to earn Bilt Points for paying rent with no transaction fee – the biggest expense most people have, and something no other card offers.
Plus you earn earn 3x at restaurants and 2x on travel. All of this earn is available as long as you make at least 5 purchases per month on the card. And it’s all with no annual fee. (See rates and fees.)
And their points are among the most valuable – with great transfer partners and a strong value travel portal. Plus – highly unusual for a no annual fee card in my experience – they even offer Trip Cancellation and Interruption Protection; Trip Delay Reimbursement; Auto Rental Collision Damage Waiver and more.
Lyft And Dining Partnerships
There are numerous additional ways to earn in the program like points for Lyft rides (they’re the most lucrative Lyft partner for this in my view) and a new dining program to earn 5x points at restaurants on top of your usual credit card earning and that stacks whether you have a Bilt credit card or not.
While I pay for Lyft rides with a Chase card (for 10x earn!), I still double dip on Lyft with Bilt Rewards earning points for each ride. You may want to credit actual Lyft spend to the Bilt card because as a Mastercard it’s eligible to earn with SimplyMiles and I’ve regularly seen SimplyMiles offers to earn American Airlines AAdvantage miles for Lyft spend. And you can also earn with Lyft through ThanksAgain on top of everything else.
Monthly Rent Day Offers
Bilt has been promoting monthly offers on the first of each month under the “Rent Day” branding. Since the card is aimed at (but not only beneficial for) renters, they’re making paying rent more rewarding.
Every month so far they’ve run an offer for double points on charges with the Bilt Mastercard®, up to 10,000 bonus points. What’s best about this offer is that it isn’t just one extra point per dollar spent – it means earning 6 points per dollar at restaurants and 4 points on travel.
They’ve been running trivia games to earn points, and opportunities to earn free rent each month as well. And then there’s been a new unique offer each month. Past offers have included 100% transfer bonuses to Hawaiian Airlines and Air France KLM and a potentially even bigger offer with Virgin.
Redeeming Bilt Points
The best way to redeem Bilt points is transferring them to partner airline and hotel programs. They’ve got coverage across all of the airline alliances, and are unique in having both United Airlines and American Airlines as transfer partners – plus Hyatt.
- Star Alliance: Air Canada Aeroplan, Turkish Miles & Smiles, United Airlines MileagePlus
- oneworld: American AAdvantage, Cathay Pacific Asia Miles
- SkyTeam: Air France KLM Flying Blue
- Non-alliance: Emirates Skywards, Virgin Atlantic Flying Club, Hawaiian Airlines HawaiianMiles
- Hotels: Hyatt, IHG Rewards
They have the program with the most extreme value (Turkish). I used HawaiianMiles for my last Hawaii trip to upgrade cheap tickets. And first class upgrades are an amazing value since I find they’re almost always available close to departure and you can even upgrade business class awards. Meanwhile, Air France KLM is the only SkyTeam program I use regularly.
You can use Bilt points at 1.25 cents apiece towards travel through their (Expedia-powered) portal, redeem for rent (please don’t) or Amazon purchases (please don’t).
Free Airline And Hotel Award Search
Point.me is a powerful tool for finding airline frequent flyer award space. They search across airlines, come back and show you what’s available, and even walk you through transferring points if you need to and making the booking yourself. It’s a premium service, but anyone who joins Bilt can use it free through the Bilt app, limited to availability with the airlines that Bilt partners with.
Bilt also lets you see hotel redemption opportunities, with Awayz built into their app and available free to all program members (as with Point.me, you do not even have to have their co-brand credit card to use this).
What’s included is Awayz Premium (normally $11.99 per month) for up to 50 hotel award searches per month. Use above that cap would require a paid subscription. It allows you to search for hotel award availability by location or specific hotel. There’s a nice mapping feature laying out points options in the city you select, for the programs you ask it to search.
You can flip back and forth between the Bilt travel portal and Awayz to see whether it’s a better deal to redeem points directly at 1.25 cents apiece or to transfer points. Remember that if you redeem points directly through the Expedia portal you aren’t entitled to earn points, elite stay credit, or to elite benefits. I suspect you’ll find you will often do better transferring to Hyatt, and redeeming directly with any other partner, just based on how much each hotel program’s points are worth.
Awayz updates data at least daily, and they tell me that for some properties (especially Hyatt) they update 5 times per day. They’ve basically got a Hyatt availability calendar, something that Hyatt itself is unable to produce (Hyatt should buy them…).
Both are great tools, normally premium priced, but available free at no cost through the Bilt app – a way to help make the most of Bilt points or any points.
A Strong Card Even If You Don’t Rent
Bilt was one of the fastest companies ever to hit unicorn status last year for good reason. They offer an amazing product at great value. And they’ve found a unique solution for finding desirable customers.
I own my home and I’m a Bilt Mastercard cardmember. I have a big Membership Rewards balance already, so I use my Bilt card for dining purchases and to take advantage of myriad promotions. This was my welcome package:
If I were a renter I’d be earning points faster. $100,000 charged in rent in a year to a credit card might cost $2,900 through a bill payment service. They let you earn up to 100,000 points per year paying rent without a fee.
However the points I do earn are super valuable. Bilt was the first program ever to offer a 100% transfer bonus to an airline partner, and they ran double points on spend for a week last year for Black Friday with a 50,000 point cap.
They just keep coming back with regular, lucrative offers which makes the earning (and redemption) potential even greater than it first appears. So it’s a program I want to be active in.
In fact I took advantage of a 150% transfer bonus opportunity to move 200,000 Bilt points into 500,000 Virgin points. So those dining charges which earned me 6 points per dollar? I was effectively earning 15 Virgin points per dollar, which is unheard of anywhere else. If only that dining had been at restaurants in their dining program. Sigh.
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