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Bilt Rewards now has free Point.me award searches right inside its app. That way you can see where your Bilt points can take you – either ‘paying with points’ at 1.25 cents apiece, or transferring their points to an airline partner.
I wrote last week how award search tool Point.me now included results for all major transferable currencies when searching its website.
- They find award availability, either based on the miles you have or literally searching almost every program that could be relevant
- They walk you through how much a given award costs booked through different programs (since some frequent flyer programs will charge less for the same flight, either in miles or taxes or both)
- And they show you how to make any needed points transfers and complete the booking.
In the Bilt mobile app, under Rewards choose Travel and then do a flight search selecting Transfer Partners rather than ‘Bilt Travel Portal’.
Point.me is a paid service. But it’s available free to Bilt Rewards members (a free program!) inside the Bilt app.
A few things to keep in mind. The purpose of offering this to Bilt members is to help take advantage of Bilt points. As a result,
- The free point.me integration is searching for award options with Bilt’s 12 airline partners, not all possible airlines that Point.me searches (so it won’t help you with Qantas member-specific award space for instance, but it’s still pretty broad)
- And when showing you transfer opportunities it’s showing what you can do with Bilt points and not showing you that another currency like American Express or Capital One might transfer also.
- Don’t be surprised if commercial award booking services decide to use this as a way of avoiding paying a monthly fee to Point.me… and get asked to stop, or at least engage in the Bilt program!
When you do an award search at point.me they’re going out and searching each loyalty program separately for availability and pricing. That can take awhile, but they show you results along the way. For now (though I believe this will change) the Bilt app is only showing results once a search completes, so it can feel like two minutes for results is a long time.
I think really highly of Point.me. Since they also offer full service concierge booking, and they’re doing an incredible job and are being built by people I greatly respect, I’ve even partnered with them in my own award booking business.
And I think really highly of Bilt, too. Their Bilt Mastercard has no annual fee card and lets you earn points paying rent at no cost (up to $100,000 per year) and earns double points on travel and triple points on dining – plus on the first day each month those earning values double for “Rent Day.” You must make at least 5 purchases each month to earn points.
Each Bilt point can be spent at 1.25 cents apiece towards travel through their portal or transferred 1:1 into:
- Star Alliance: Air Canada Aeroplan, Turkish Miles & Smiles, United Airlines MileagePlus
- oneworld: American AAdvantage, Cathay Pacific Asia Miles, British Airways Executive Club, Iberia Plus
- SkyTeam: Air France KLM Flying Blue
- Non-alliance: Emirates Skywards, Virgin Atlantic Flying Club, Hawaiian Airlines HawaiianMiles, Aer Lingus Aer Club
- Hotels: Hyatt, IHG Rewards
With these great options – they have American and United as well as Hyatt as well as unique high value partners like Turkish – please don’t redeem your Bilt points with Amazon!
This new search capability, integrating Point.me into the Bilt app, is huge for introducing the ability to redeem points on all of Bilt’s transfer partners to members who would have never thought to do this (or figured it out). And bringing the metasearch capability to them – for free – is real value add.
I suspect it’ll also be useful to readers, who will want to make sure to at least download the Bilt app and pay a bit more attention to Bilt Rewards, because of how much easier it makes award search using this tool – for anyone who wants to spend American, United, Air Canada, Turkish, or numerous other miles. And by the way that makes the no annual fee Bilt Mastercard better, too.
I already do daily “brute force” award searches in the programs I have points with. What would be useful however is to set up a service that alerts you when an award has become available in the program of your choice. That saves endless hours of meaningless award searching for award space that is not available (yet).
*…when SAVER AWARDS have become available.
Adds about 50 cents value to Bilt.
@Gene – you already have a sophisticated award search strategy, so not value to you and that’s fair. I’d posit you do not have the average use case among frequent flyer program members. Between you and your partner what’s your total mileage balance across programs? 😉
Bilt, if you cannot use it for rent, is less valuable than Citi Premiere, Capital One Venture, and likely AMEX and Chase. Those offer portability but point earning is on multiple points for broad categories like travel, food, restaurants, etc.
This integration is also not on the desktop website, the place where you would most want it.
The full version of Point.me, as has been reported here by numerous people, is so buggy as to be useless. Re-christen it Disappoint.me. Don’t expect the technically deficient clowns behind it to fix that. But do look for a competitor that DOES work because the end goal is so valuable.
Do you know if Mastercard Bilt can be requested by those who don’t have an ssn? Or without ITIN ? Because for us, Brazilians, only amex cards have been achieved through their partnership with nova credit.
@ Gary — Undoubtedly, less than you and your spouse!
Doesn’t appear to be work on their web site even though I just received an email claiming it does. Even included a link.
Bilt-ed.
Does one need a point.me account for this feature to work? Whenever I try to search from the app (transfer partners side) I only get a “sample points estimates” and a prompt to sign up. It does not actually do any searches. Am I missing something?