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Bilt Rewards, which only just launched its travel portal with Expedia last week, has another big partnership out already with Amazon.com.
Bilt is the loyalty program for renters, that even homeowners can really benefit from – I have their Bilt Mastercard and while I don’t take advantage of earning 1 point per dollar paying rent with no fee (up to $100,000 per year) since I don’t rent, I love that it’s a no annual fee card that earns 3 points on dining and two points on travel and has great partners. You must make at least 5 purchases each month to earn points.
They’re offering 250 points just for linking a Bilt Mastercard account with your Amazon account, and another 250 bonus points with your first transaction redeeming Bilt points. You can redeem Bilt Rewards points at Amazon for $0.007 in value each. Here Bilt joins American Express, Citibank, Capital One, Chase, and Hilton Honors with Amazon redemption options.
This isn’t how I’m going to redeem my points, but I’m going to link my account, and I’m impressed they’ve rolled this out so quickly. Here’s (3) key takeaways for how you should think about the offer,
- More options are better. The ability to redeem points at Amazon doesn’t take away from anything else you can do with Bilt points, so it’s a net plus to the program.
- Free points are great. You should link your account because they’re giving you a limited time bonus for doing so, no purchase required. They’ve given away a bunch of free points and indeed give you points for linking your airline and hotel loyalty accounts of Bilt partner programs.
- Bilt points are too valuable so please don’t spend your points this way. They’re transfer partners are great – none of Chase, American Express, Citibank, or Capital One have both American Airlines and United for transfers, plus Bilt has Hyatt and Aeroplan, Air France and Turkish (among others) and a travel portal where points are worth 1.25 cents apiece.
Perhaps most important is what this partnership means for Bilt, and why it supports the value of their points even if it’s not an option I’d take advantage of.
- When I compared the value of transferable currencies most recently I suggested that Bilt’s transfer partners stacked up well against the best of the competition, and their points should be at least as valuable or even more valuable than other transferable card programs.
- But they were still new and hadn’t proven themselves yet. Chase has a track record of spending hundreds of millions of dollars more than they’d planned in order to defend the value of their transferable points.
Bilt has come a long way now that they not only keep adding transfer partners and redemption options but (1) have Wells Fargo backing as their card issuer, (2) have partnered with Expedia, and (3) also now with Amazon. They’ve gone from program launch to the big leagues in just one year.
BILT has shown themselves to be able competitor. An annoying aspect of the their points crediting is that points round down on purchases, $2.99 rounds down to $2.
Overall, there are good points earnings, but if using the card as a main go to, it can mean the loss of hundreds of points over a year.
It would seem a simple fix, but the explanation was: “they are new to the market”.
Until they either allow mortgages to be paid through their system like rent or add some more 3% categories, I don’t think Bilt will be successful. Why would I sign up with an unknown group, when I can get 3% back at restaurants from Chase, via the Freedom Flex card (also no AF)?
BILT is issued by Wells Fargo, far from an unknown group. BILT already distinguishes itself by allowing rent payers to earn points without additional fees and offer other compelling benefits to an under served huge group of renters.
They have a unique credit card travel partner in AA and continue to expand their redemption options. They’ve been aggressive in keeping up the interest level and will likely offer other bonus programs like 5X and 10X to keep people applying and using their card.