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Airfare strategy is shifting. If you’ve always booked tickets directly with airlines to maximize card rewards and protect benefits, there’s now a better play: using a travel portal that codes as a direct airline purchase while earning a second layer of points on top of your best-earning card.
I book most of my airlines tickets direct with the airline, and pay with my American Express Platinum Card® (see rates and fees). That way I earn 5 Membership Rewards points per dollar spent, and I get Amex travel protections.
However I’ve been considering shifting airline ticket spend over to the Chase Sapphire Reserve® (See rates and fees) because bookings through the Chase travel portal – including airfare – earn 8 points per dollar.
That’s especially valuable to me because $75,000 spend on the card also earns $500 in Southwest credit via Chase Travel, $250 Shops at Chase Credit, Southwest Rapid Rewards A-List status, and IHG One Rewards Diamond status.
There’s a bit of a monkey-wrench in my thinking, though, and that’s Bilt’s travel portal. They moved largely to a direct booking model, where you’re booking through them but these are actually airline and hotel provider reservations. You can still get customer service directly.
- Bilt gives you points on all of your travel portal purchases – even airfare.
- You can use any card that you wish and link to your Bilt account.
- So that’s points-earning in addition to what your card gives you.
Bilt Rewards members will earn 1 Bilt Point for every $1 spent on all eligible transactions that are not charged to a Bilt World Elite Mastercard® and are made through the Bilt Travel Portal.
For transactions made with a combination of cash and Bilt Points, you will receive 1 point per $1 spent on the cash portion of the transaction. Points will be awarded within 5-7 business days of the trip being taken, not at the time of booking.
The following transactions made through the Bilt Travel Portal are eligible: airfare, hotels, car rental & things to do.
Here’s a Delta Air Lines ticket purchase through the Bilt travel portal which also earns 5 Membership Rewards points per dollar for paying with an American Express Platinum Card.
Confirmed: Flights through Bilt portal code as airline MCC- Amex Platinum 5x stack
byu/ayoglizzychexk inbiltrewards
At that point, why book direct instead of through Bilt?
- You’re getting an extra Bilt point per dollar on your airline ticket bookings for going through their portal.
- I consider Bilt points to be the single most valuable currency. They have the best transfer partners (as well as the best transfer bonuses).
- And these points count towards Bilt Rewards status. I really want to keep my Bilt Platinum status – which got me free airport helicopter rides this year and Air France Gold status (free checked begs, priority and free exit row seats on Delta) and Accor Platinum status this year, and qualifies me for the biggest transfer bonuses.
The natural play is to book airline tickets through Bilt (unless they flag a transaction as not direct, possible with some obscure carriers), paying with your best-earning airfare card, e.g. Amex Platinum 5x + Bilt 1 or Chase Sapphire Reserve 4x + Bilt 1.
My inclination is to go with Chase Sapphire Reserve that spend should also help me reach the $75,000 spend threshold rewards. But this is a perfectly great play regardless of what card you’re using, whether it’s an airline co-brand or a card that earns 3x on airfare as well.
Plus, between this and earning Bilt points with Rakuten it shouldn’t be too hard to keep Bilt Platinum for 2027.
- New Rakuten members can earn 5,000 bonus points. Sign up directly with Rakuten – not through the Bilt app – and link your account with Bilt later. That’s because this is a bigger bonus than the one offered through Bilt.
- You can make any purchase at the Rakuten shopping portal through one of their participating merchants, and when you spend $50 or more you’ll be earning 5,000 points. And for now that’s like getting 5,000 free Bilt points (only Bilt elite members are promised 1:1 transfers after the first six monts of the relationship).
- The $50 can be purchase of a gift card you’ll use. You’re spending $50 and getting Bilt points worth more than that back.
This same sort of Bilt double dip works, by the way, with hotels – make sure you’re booking these direct rates – just bear in mind that you may be able to do better with discounted rates like AAA or contract rates.
It’s similar to what Rove is doing and Rove promises to bring AAA and similar rates online. You just need to check that Rove isn’t overcharging the room.
For rates and fees of the American Express Platinum Card®, click here.
Bilt confirmed the 5/15/26 Rakuten transfer date will be 1:1 regardless of Bilt status.
Bilt points earned through Rakuten do not count for Bilt status, unless I am missing something.
“Plus, between this and earning Bilt points with Rakuten it shouldn’t be too hard to keep Bilt Platinum for 2027.”
Bilt points earned through Rakuten do not count towards Bilt status. People also mentioned this in the comments on the post you linked to.
If this is ultimately BILT’s strategy to survive 2.0, from WF to Cardless, I donno; hoping they succeed because I like their overall program (I like earning points on paying rent without a 3% fee, etc.) Some portals are great (Amex, Chase), some are awful (Citi, just their user-interface alone).
Is it harder or just more confusing to make a change in your travel plans when booking through another portal? If you book through the airline, you know who to talk to and what the rules are.
I have shifted much of my airfare spend to the Chase portal for the 8x points, although always check because sometimes their fares are higher. Getting 8x points coupled with the Points Boost fares make it possible to earn 16 cents back on every dollar toward premium cabin flights (that then also earn miles). To me, this is a solution to the extreme lack of availability for saver-level premium cabin flights.
A question I have for the readers and those who book thru some of these portals – how are they for guest recovery/rebookings? As a travel agency owner (like, legit one, you can even come visit us in person), we can rebook our clients instantly in Sabre, we get alerts of flight cancellations/delays and proactively reprotrect you when things happen. Airlines love to tell many people you have to go thru your booking agent for refunds, rebooks, etc and we see that *many* don’t do this. (but it sure makes for some interesting reading on other blogs).
I don’t book about 1/2 of my friends’ travel because they do the same you mention in your blog and I get it. But just wondering with some of these points and bonuses, is it worth the drama if/when things go wrong and customer support is farmed out to some Pan-Pacific nation where they are merely order takers on the phone and can’t help you.
So you’d rather earn 4 Chase UR points + 1 Bilt point by booking direct, rather than 8 Chase UR points through Chase Travel?
@haolenate — Since you asked, and because I actually read your/others comments:
I’ve booked through Amex, mostly when the International Airline Program (IAP) has discounted Business Class with the Platinum card (like, in those cases, it cost less than booking directly, usually by a several hundred dollars.) After the fact, when there were significant schedule changes, and I wanted to request refunds or to modify further (like, select different rebooking, etc.), yeah, those airlines direct me to the ‘travel agent’ (Amex), and I need to call them, and then an Amex agent does basically what I could’ve done myself (call the airline, request different options, etc.) It can be tedious, but those situations are the outliers, not the norm. Usually the original itineraries go without issue.
On the refunds, this is where this gets interesting, in my opinion, because some airlines attempt to use the OTA as an excuse to not fulfill its obligations under the US DOT for timely cash refunds (not mere expiring airline credits) within 7 business days. Had some real problems with cxLoyalty back when they were the servicer (lots of finger-pointing, ultimately resolved, but not fun.)
And, no, none of it was “customer support is farmed out to some Pan-Pacific nation”… it was supposedly some a-hole in Stamford, Connecticut. At the time, it was frustrating enough, I was thinking to myself, do I need to literally take the MetroNorth and visit their offices to explain (calmly) how they’re screwing me… Nah, not helpful; better to just keep appealing, be persistent, patient, and eventually you ‘win’ so long as the underlying facts and rules are on your side and you never give up.
Hope this helps, and if not, feel free to say mean things about me, just for fun/spite. Feed me.
@1990. Thanks for the feedback to @haolenat. I also found it useful.
@Jeff,
Speaking for myself, yes, I’d prefer to have a direct booking with the airline rather than booking through the Chase travel portal. I bought some Premium Economy tickets through the travel portal on ITA for Rome – Boston, that actually was a code share on Delta (second mistake!). When we checked in, the seats were only economy.
I called the Chase customer service from Rome- got a nice woman in the US. She confirmed they should be Premium Economy as that’s what showed up in their reservations. So she got ITA on the phone with us, who also confirmed that they were Premium Economy in their system. So they then went to get Delta on the phone, and after over an hour, my phone dropped.
I showed Delta at the counter my confirmation from Chase, they just shrugged and said it was an ITA problem. We flew in regular economy…
Stick to booking flights direct. It’s not worth the additional 3 points per dollar.
@Thing 1 — You’re welcome. I like the site most when folks share their experiences. I read others stuff and learn things every day.
Gary, you recommend booking flights through Bilt, but this was also posted on Reddit yesterday, which makes me hesitant to book through Bilt:
https://www.reddit.com/r/biltrewards/comments/1p0hpge/need_help_bilt_travel_wont_refund_my_hawaiian
@Nate – it’s not clear in that story what’s driving the price here, or how booking direct would have been any different than booking through Bilt? The poster needed to change a ticket, bought a nonrefundable fare and couldn’t get a refund, and was being quoted a high change fee for the new itinerary they wanted – but there’s not reference I could see to what a new ticket would have cost for those flights.