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Bilt has announced their next set of Rent Day promotions and there’s a couple of excellent opportunities, both involving their newest transfer partner – Alaska Airlines. On July 1 you’ll be able to get a 25%-100% transfer bonus to Alaska based on your Bilt status, plus Bilt Gold and Platinum members can get MVP and MVP Gold status respectively through the end of the year. This status match is available right now through July 1.
The Deal
- Bilt is offering the following Rent Day promotions on July 1:
- Alaska Airlines transfer bonus:
- Bilt Platinum members – 100% bonus
- Bilt Gold members – 75% bonus
- Bilt Silver members – 50% bonus
- Bilt Blue members – 25% bonus
- Alaska Airlines status match:
- Transfer 10,000 Bilt points to Alaska Airlines (not eligible for transfer bonus) & get the following status:
- Bilt Platinum members – Alaska MVP Gold status
- Bilt Gold members – Alaska MVP status
- Transfer 10,000 Bilt points to Alaska Airlines (not eligible for transfer bonus) & get the following status:
- Alaska Airlines transfer bonus:
Key Terms
- Transfer bonus:
- Offer valid July 1, 2024 from 0:00am ET to July 2, 2024 at 2:59am ET.
- Blue members must transfer a minimum of 2,000 Bilt points.
- Limit of 50,000 Bilt Points transferred to Alaska Airlines for each Bilt member will be eligible for the bonus.
- Status match:
- Offer valid June 25 to July 1, 2024.
- Status expires December 31, 2024.
- To activate this offer, you must transfer 10,000 Bilt points to Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan from the dedicated elite status pages.
- The 10,000 Bilt points don’t count for the 25%-100% transfer bonus and don’t count towards the 50,000 point bonus limit.
Quick Thoughts
Now that’s more like it! There’s been a series of underwhelming Bilt Rent Day promotions in recent months, but they’re back with a bang for July 1.
Managing to get Alaska Airlines on board as a transfer partner was impressive seeing as they’re not a partner of any of the other major transferable currencies. These latest Rent Day opportunities have the potential to provide a lot of value, but there’s a couple of important things to be aware of.
First, as with all of their transfer bonuses over the past year or so, the bonus percentage varies depending on your status level with Bilt. For those without status, you get a not-ungenerous 25% bonus. For those with Silver, Gold or Platinum status, you’ll get a 50%, 75% or 100% bonus respectively. The key thing to note with the transfer bonus is that the bonus is only applied on the first 50,000 Bilt points you transfer; above that it’ll be the standard 1:1 ratio.
For those with Bilt Gold or Platinum status, being able to get Alaska Airlines status through the end of the year is a fantastic opportunity too. That requires transferring 10,000 Bilt points to Alaska and, most importantly to note, those 10,000 points won’t get bonused at the 75% or 100% rate. Instead, they transfer on a 1:1 basis and the transfer has to be initiated from the dedicated elite status pages in the app. Alternatively, if you scroll down the home page of the app you should see it listed there:
Note that the status match opportunity is valid from now through July 1, while the transfer bonus will only be available on July 1. We’ll republish this post on the first of the month as a reminder.
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A positive data point for Bilt customer service: we tried for the rent day bonus, and the transfer was taking hours to process (like others have commented). Bilt emailed us late on July 1st saying that the transfer failed… but we only saw the email the next day.
Off chance we initiated a chat with Bilt CS (just type “representative” – you’ll get an email from a CS person). Our Alaska account had been made inactive, but a quick call to Alaska fixed that. We had a 1 day delay with the July 4th holiday, but Bilt honored the transfer bonus (by giving us extra points to transfer after our fixed initial Alaska transfer). All Bilt CS was through email.
Playing the Points Quest game for our monthly couple hundred free points today – I missed any publications that noted that the program was ending this month! Bit of a bummer for those of without the Bilt card who liked to get a few free point opportunities. It wouldn’t surprise me if it wasn’t generating enough conversions to card holders for Bilt to continue all the free point expenses.
First time transferring with Bilt, anyone else transfer to Alaska but haven’t received the points yet?
Been waiting 4+ hours.
I’ve been waiting 8.75 hours at this point…I’m glad I didn’t have any grand plans to use the miles immediately.
Around 8 hrs here too, nothing yet, and the in app chat is just AI robot boilerplate about status taking 14 business days and the points taking 96 hours
Will the status match to MVP Gold (and higher) include all of the benefits — namely the first class upgrade certs, etc? Do not see anything mentioned either way in the terms
50k cap – the juice out of Bilt has been squeezed
Any tips for actually getting the Bilt card? I live in a Bilt building in NYC (so hefty rent which could be points…) but I was rejected (even after requesting reconsideration and providing address verification). I just moved to the US in January so despite a >700 credit score my age of accounts is probably working against me? If I open a Wells Fargo account would that help? Or should I give it a year or so and focus on Chase or something (sod’s law, by which time Bilt will have devalued everything considerably, I’m missing out on all these great bonuses!)
Unsure how to play this… I have 300k Alaska miles banked, but live in Seattle so I use em.
13k spend away from Gold (can pay taxed to get to gold).
Worth spending 13k to get to MVP match ability…get the extra 25%, for miles I dont necessarily need asap?
The show has suggested that you could pay taxes for the next year. Another play could be to advance pay some bills like cell phone and cable. I remember Nick talked about how he got he did a ton of expend on a short notice on Bilt. Not sure of the episode but if you find it, it could help you here.
I would love a post/podcast going over the transfer bonus and status match. I am on the fece on how to play this as a Gold tier bilt member.
So, as a BILT cardholder with gold status, it seems like the opportunity cost for getting Alaska MVP status with the 10k transfer is missing out on 7500 bonus points that I could otherwise get from the transfer bonus. Does anyone have any input on if this is a worthwhile offer? I’m going to be flying AA a few times later this year but those are on tickets that were booked while I had the Platinum status challenge, so I already get 2 checked bags free. I also have an AA card so the 1 checked bag for free doesn’t do much for me. Are there any other tangible benefits from MVP status? It doesn’t seem like the odds of an upgrade are very high.
Is anyone else doing MVP Gold. I’m not sure I’m seeing the advantages fully. Would it be better to have Turkish status so you get domestic lounges?
For AA fans this is making up for the lack of an Avios transfer bonus from Amex we have not seen this year yet. Alaska prices awards lower than avios with only a slightly higher feees than BA and I think a better cancellation policy. Im doing the full load of 50k on this one!
Imagine if Alaska (as well as Cathay and JAL) joined the Avios currency.
So cool of them to announce this the day after transfers to AA ended and everyone emptied their accounts.
In fairness to them, this is the standard timing for announcing the Rent Day bonus, and I doubt they had much control over when the AA transfers ended.
Did “everyone” empty their accounts with transfers to AA? We’d been saying that it didn’t seem to us to make any sense to dump all your points. Bilt has a great slate of partners. And given their history of generous transfer bonuses, I’d personally never consider a speculative transfer except during one of these huge transfer bonuses. I do like AA miles, but not enough more than Hyatt points or LifeMiles or Aeroplan as to have proactively transferred them out. I’m sure that some people did that, but I don’t imagine that “everyone emptied their accounts”.
Certainly “everyone” was a bit of an exaggeration (and I think most people would know that). But, I think focusing on that is missing the forest for the trees (and comes across as a bit defensive for no particular reason, since I assume it wasn’t your decision when to announce this).
Obviously they knew this was coming and made a specific decision when to announce it. It doesn’t seem coincidental it was the day after AA transfers ended.
The main reason I can think of for them to wait, is in the hope that it would reduce the number of people taking advantage of the bonus. They get the same marketing benefit of the bonus either way, but probably less expense if fewer people actually do it.
Even if that wasn’t the specific reason, I think it’s pretty safe to say that it was putting business over customer, because any reasonable customer would prefer to be more informed about their options.
And from the customer perspective, I think it’s reasonable to express that, even if I doubt it will have any impact.
I will say I think your post outlining lots of good uses for Alaska points is inspiring for some good uses for AS points, and hopefully this promo will come around again. Personally with UA reducing partner availability (per your April post), I’ve been finding AA points having increased value lately as the only reasonably-“priced” points option for some domestic itineraries. Plus, ironically, it’s been some of the best value for my AS 100k status. Will definitely be missing having Bilt’s AA transfer option in the future.
Bilt didn’t add Alaska as a transfer partner until mid-May, so the only time they could’ve offered a transfer bonus earlier than July 1 was June 1. I don’t know what went on behind the scenes with Bilt and Alaska, but I imagine the priority was getting Alaska on board and integrated before also doing something like offering an up to 100% transfer bonus.
With regards to the specific timing, Bilt always officially announces Rent Day promos 5 or 6 days before the first day of the next month, so there was nothing unusual about the timing of this announcement – it’s exactly the same as it’s always been, at least for the last 6 months anyway (I checked).
Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that they decided to announce the transfer bonus for July rather than, say, September, but if so I’d attribute that to them wanting to make Bilt members focus on the Alaska gain instead of the American loss, rather than them hoping Bilt members would transfer all their points to AA and so have none left to transfer to Alaska.
Who knows – you could be right. It might all be a coincidence of timing based on their normal announcement cadence.
As far as “focus on the Alaska gain instead of the American loss,” I still feel that personally, that would’ve been achieved better if someone in marketing had said “hey, maybe we should announce this a couple days earlier.” Then, it would’ve been picking between 2 positive uses for points – rather than seeming like a risk analysis of prospective transfers (as in Nick’s post above).
But maybe that’s getting too far into behavioral economics for a points transfer bonus ,:D Plus, who knows what Alaska and AA dictated date-wise.
There’s still a lot to be positive about, though – this gives a lot to look forward to.
Who was it who said they would be surprised if Bilt did a transfer bonus to a US-based loyalty program?
That was pretty much the universal consensus; I’d still be floored if they did a transfer bonus to United or Hyatt.
I certainly said that and I am shocked as I said I would be. I never expected a 100% transfer bonus to a US-based program.
Reflecting on your rationale, it absolutely made sense . . . and I’m similarly (but pleasantly) surprised. (Just remember, Ted Williams *only* batted 400.)
On a different note, given the January 1st transfer bonus and now this July 1st transfer bonus, I suspect we’re in a transitional semi-annual pattern and moving towards an ultimate annual transfer bonus. And, the 50k cap might be permanent. If such is the case, Bilt’s economic exposure to a Hyatt or United bonus is capped. And so maybe . . .
It might well be that Bilt will be more measured with the gravy going forward. But, for those fortunate enough to have been early adopters of the card, the first two years were one heck of a ride. My wife and I have nothing but thanks to Bilt.
Except we had the Feb 1 transfer bonus to Aeroplan too. And the Jan 1 bonus was to 3 partners (IHG, FB, and VS). They seem to be in the 3-4/year. I expected a bonus last month, but given the AA stuff, it makes sense that they had to sunset that partnership before doing this. I expect one more bonus sometime in the fall.
Now this is a Rent Day promo. I’m a DCA flyer who has Platinum Pro with AA, so I think I’ll pass on the status match, but will definitely take advantage of the transfer bonus; I’m juicing my Bilt spend over the next 6 days to get more available points, too.