Over the last 6 months Bilt has made quite a few changes to its lineup of transfer partners. They have a big loss coming with the removal of American Airlines next month, but added Alaska Airlines recently, as well as Avianca LifeMiles and Marriott Bonvoy late last year.
There’s now a new transfer partner being added from today – Hilton Honors. Don’t get too excited about its addition for now though because it has a poor transfer ratio.
That’s because Bilt Rewards points will only transfer to Hilton on a 1:1 basis. That’s extremely poor value for your points considering you can frequently buy Hilton points for 0.5cpp and Bilt points can otherwise be transferred to higher value partners like Hyatt.
Base level Blue members will have to transfer at least 2,000 points, while anyone with Bilt Silver status or higher can transfer a minimum of 1,000 points. From May 8-June 8, 2024, Bilt is offering 1,000 bonus Hilton Honors points when making any transfer, but that won’t be worth it either. Even if you have Silver status or above with Bilt, transferring 1,000 points would get you only 2,000 points which means you’re still only getting ~1cpp of value.
Bilt has stated that there’ll be further promotions and additional benefits with Hilton, although they haven’t disclosed what those will be yet. If I had to guess, Bilt members at a certain status level will be able to get Hilton Honors Silver status, or perhaps there’ll be some kind of status match or challenge similar to the ones they’ve offered for Hyatt and Flying Blue. I also wouldn’t be surprised if we see some kind of transfer bonus in the future, although it’d need to be at least a 200% transfer bonus to make it worth considering.
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Well written and informative article. I probably won’t be transferring to Hilton, but more transfer partners is better than less. Thanks, Stephen!
Rumor has it that there’s some upcoming deals with Marriott for a future Rent Day promotion, but it’s going to have to be awfully good to be worth transferring to Bonvoy.
Similar to having IHG as a partner, where even the 100% transfer bonus over was a bit ho-hum. I can’t see Bilt ever getting as a good standard transfer ratio to Hilton as AMEX given the tight relationship between those two with co-branded cards.
I agree with you on the transfer bonus. I am sure we will see a 100%-200% Hilton transfer bonus in the coming months. Remember, we need Bilt to have a wide variety of transfer partners so that the “not so good” transfers offset the “really good” transfer bonuses.