Bilt Rewards has added a couple of new features to their app today – Bilt Dining and Bilt Wallet. Bilt Dining is the more interesting of the two features for now, but Bilt Wallet is currently offering up to 300 bonus points and has the potential to be even more rewarding in the future depending on how Bilt develops that feature.
The Deal
- Earn 5x points when paying with a card linked in the Bilt Rewards app at participating restaurants.
- Earn 100 bonus points up to three times when adding a payment card to your Bilt Wallet in the app.
- Direct link to download app – Google Play
- Direct link to download app – App Store
Key Terms
- There is no cap to points earned through Bilt Dining. It may take up to 7 days after paying for your meal at a Bilt Dining restaurant for 5x points to post to your Bilt Rewards account.
- In order to earn points, the merchant name of the order must be the Bilt Dining restaurant. If the merchant of the order is a delivery service (ie: Seamless, GrubHub, Uber Eats), the Bilt Member will not receive the 5X points for that order.
Quick Thoughts
These two new features are somewhat interesting, although as things stand they’re not going to be overly exciting unless you live in one of a handful of big cities. That’s because the Bilt Dining program is currently only available in the following locations, although there are more cities to come:
- New York
- Chicago
- Atlanta
- Boston
- Dallas
When opening the Bilt Rewards app, you can view participating restaurants near you by tapping on the ‘Dining’ tab at the top. The app only seems to display restaurants within a certain distance of your location; possibly a 500 mile radius as I’m currently seeing Chicago restaurant options which are 400+ miles away from my current location, but not Dallas which is just over 500 miles away.
I imagine that in mid-October Real Time Sports in Elk Grove Village will see an influx of people eating there for a couple of days seeing as it’s participating in the Bilt Dining program and is only a few miles from where the Chicago Seminars are being held.
You’ll earn 5x Bilt Rewards points when paying with a linked card which is a great return considering those points can be transferred to partners like American Airlines, Hyatt and more. Those points are on top of the points you’ll earn by putting the spend on a credit card that offers bonus points on dining purchases.
It might also be possible to stack this with another dining program. I don’t think it’s powered by Rewards Network which is the company that powers most other dining programs for airlines and hotel chains. If any of the restaurants overlap between the programs, I’d assume that you can double dip. Whether there any overlapping restaurants though is another matter.
In order for Bilt Dining to track your dining purchase, you need to add your payment card(s) to the equally newly launched Bilt Wallet. That feature can be found in the bottom right corner of the app and Bilt is currently offering 100 bonus points for each credit or debit card you link, with a limit of 300 bonus points.
Their press release states “We created this as a way for Bilt Members to be able to earn more points across more categories, starting with dining.” That hopefully bodes well for them adding additional card-linked earning opportunities in the future beyond dining, but what categories those will be, how rewarding they’ll be and when we might see those new features implemented remains to be seen.
Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
Nice . I have 2 of my regular restaurant listed in the app
But will the card-linked offers stack with other programs? anyone know what it runs on?
Wow I’ve been to 2 on the list!! If they give a bonus to first time use, I’m there
8x ttl using the Bilt MC (as you pointed out).
Props to Bilt they came up with a fresh program that doesn’t repeat same-old Rewards Network (like all the other hotel/airline dining programs), but not seeing super-attractive restaurants even so. Maybe they’ll add to in time…
Another benefit to Bilt not on Rewards Network – can duplicate cards (with dining bonus cats) already assigned to AA/Choice/Marriott dining programs
Unless they rapidly add many more cities, not using Rewards Network actually is a negative for many. Unfortunately the UI design they chose for selecting a city makes me not very optimistic about near-term growth plans.
On the plus side, their definition of NYC seems to be the metro area, including lots of restaurants in NJ. So maybe if they add LAX and SFO, it will include large swaths of SoCal and NorCal.
I think it is a positive for all that we can use both the Rewards Network program (& those cards assigned by travel partner) along with Bilt Dining and any card we want (incl the above). I am not otherwise seeing any restaurant duplications for my city between them – Bilt is concentrated in higher caliber dining locations than RN.