Bilt Mastercard has launched a really cool functionality for Bilt Rewards customers: you can now search for American Airlines and Aeroplan awards within the Bilt app. That’s awesome and a huge win for Bilt customers. Frankly, I’m very surprised that Bilt was able to pull off this functionality with what apparently must be the blessing of American Airlines and Aeroplan.
View from the Wing shows how you can search for and apparently quickly find award availability as though you are actually on the American Airlines or Aeroplan site. He reports results loading quickly, which sounds like a nice improvement over my recent American Airlines searches.
The search functionality is right in the app:
From there, Bilt prompts you to search American or Aeroplan and labels their respective alliances to make it clear that you will get other results within the alliance.
From there, as you can see, the interface looks very familiar if you’ve ever booked an award flight on the American Airlines website.
As Gary notes, it is really wild to see Bilt launch this on the heels of Award Wallet being forced to pull American Airlines integration and delete AA account information on their customers without warning. Clearly, American and Aeroplan see value in making it easy for Bilt customers to find award pricing.
That actually makes sense given that the airlines are in the business of selling miles and the biggest customers of those miles are credit card issuers. Given that Bilt provides a way for people to earn miles paying rent without any fee, I wouldn’t be very surprised if Bilt’s customers spend more on credit cards every month than the average American (citizen) since rent is a relatively large expense that most people aren’t paying with a card yet.
Still, the integration looks fascinating and what a selling point for Bilt in reaching customers who find transfer programs too confusing: they can search right in the app to see how many points a flight will cost without the extra step of going out to the American Airlines or Aeroplan site to figure out how to do that. Consolidating both rewards program and rewards search tool in one place is very interesting indeed.
Overall, I find Bilt’s push to innovate really exciting. While there are other ways to earn rewards for paying rent — perhaps even more rewards depending on the methods you employ — Bilt certainly offers a streamlined / simple way to do it. They also have a terrific slate of transfer partners. If they are able to do this with more partners — and if they can get Turkish to add a checkout button to pay for a flight online — I just might have to get a Bilt card after all.
If you are interested in the Bilt card, you can skip the waitlist with code FM4BILT. Note that Frequent Miler doesn’t have any sort of compensation for this — Bilt simply passed on a way for readers to skip the waitlist and we pass it on for those interested.
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Can you pay rent with Bilt for an office space? The landlord does not accept credit cards.
No, only residential.
true but is it any better than aa.com?
It is aa.com. It looks like they are using an iframe to display aa.com.