Back in January 2023, Bilt Rewards partnered with the search tool Point.me in order to display award pricing for its transfer partners within its travel portal. That functionality was initially only available in the Bilt app, but a few months later it was expanded to the Bilt website too.
The thing is, Point.me used to run award searches extremely slowly; I’m not sure if that’s still the case or not as that was a key reason I stopped using it 2-3 years ago. Bilt has now ended its partnership with Point.me, but has struck up a new partnership with a different search tool instead: Points Path.
When doing a search in the Bilt travel portal, it’ll initially display the results for cash fares only, as well as the number of Bilt Rewards points you’d need to redeem if redeeming those for 1.25 cents per point via the travel portal.
If you’d like to see award pricing too, you need to click on the ‘Award availability’ button that you can see in the screenshot below:
That’ll then add a column at the end where award pricing (and any associated taxes and fees) will be displayed alongside the cash pricing. It defaults to displaying economy award pricing, but there’s a dropdown box where you can select premium economy, business, and first class pricing:
This could be really handy functionality, especially for Bilt Rewards members who are new to award booking. That said, it’s worth being aware that at the moment it only works for one way flights, it’s only for select Bilt transfer partners, and it’s only for flights operated directly by each airline. Their plan is to expand that to include partner awards.
When testing this out, I noticed a few quirks that are worth being aware of. Seeing as the award pricing is only displayed for select Bilt transfer partners, if you run a search and then click the ‘Award availability’ button, all other cash fares for non-Bilt partners disappear. While that’s somewhat understandable, it’s a shame that Bilt’s travel portal doesn’t retain those flight options in the search results in order to more easily compare all flights available to you, rather than having to switch back and forth.
Something that I did find interesting is that Points Path via Bilt is displaying Avios award pricing and availability. I have the Points Path extension installed for Google Flights and I’ve never noticed British Airways Avios pricing displayed there. I wasn’t sure if this was a new development, but I ran a Google Flights/Points Path search and it didn’t display any awards for British Airways, but Bilt/Points Path did.
Some functionality that’ll hopefully be included in the future is the ability to sort the search results by award pricing. You can sort results by cash pricing, but award pricing is listed in cash pricing order too, so the award pricing fluctuates up and down as you scroll through the options.
Bilt’s integration of Points Path is definitely a positive development, especially compared to its former partnership with Point.me. However, it is important to remember that a possible limitation of this partnership is that searches only display award flights bookable with a select group of Bilt transfer partners. That could mean that you’re missing out on award availability if you limit your searches to Bilt’s travel portal, so it’s worth installing the Points Path browser extension for Google Flights too. I’d also recommend checking out our post about Points Path, as well as Greg’s post about the best award search tools here because each search tool has its quirks and some find different availability to others.
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I like PointsPath extension for Google Flights, generally.
Does this show JAL award prices for, say, Air France or other partner flights, or only award pricing for JAL metal?
For argument sake, let’s say Bilt *will* go bankrupt in two years. Until that happens, Bilt has built one heck of an ecosystem.
What a rave review…