When you have multiple family members working together to earn travel rewards, it becomes more important to share and combine points. So which programs are best for this ability to share?
The best transferable points for multi-player households
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(02:07) – Why Transferable Points matter
(05:07) – Why transferable point sharing matters
(07:20) – Read more about Citi discontinuing points sharing here
And read about Wells Fargo’s end to combining points here
(08:04) – Transferable points ranked from worst to best for points sharing
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Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie Yoder
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There’s one gotcha with Capital One points sharing that I wasn’t aware of until it almost bit me: you have to call them to transfer points and you can’t call 24/7, their call center has business hours.
So if you find a perfect redemption in the middle of the night and want to transfer some points to jump on it, you may have to wait until the next morning and hope that it’s still available (this came up for me but luckily the redemption was still available the next morning).
So I would argue that for sharing points with household members specifically, Chase beats Capital One since you can transfer the points online.
I just realized that there is an argument to be made that Bilt is worse than Citi and Wells Fargo when it comes to points sharing.
Yes, I am mostly saying this to troll. But I don’t think the argument is actually that ridiculous.
Bilt allows you to redirect points and Bilt cash earnings from an authorized user card to the primary cardholder’s Bilt account. That is how every other card works by default. So Bilt doesn’t actually have an advantage over Citi or Wells Fargo in that regard. And in particular, Bilt charges $50 for an Obsidian AU. Wells Fargo does not charge for an AU on any of its cards. Citi does not charge for Strata Premier AUs. On the Strata Elite it charges $75, which is $20 less than it costs to get a Palladium AU.
So in a very real sense, you can get the same points sharing features available at Bilt with Citi and Wells Fargo, but cheaper!
What Bilt allows you to do, but the other issuers do not, is for Authorized Users to send rewards to their own account (they can choose to send Bilt Cash, Bilt Points, or both). That’s less “points sharing” and more “points dividing”. Then, yes, if you want to pool all rewards in the AU’s account you can have the primary user put all their spending on the AU’s card, which has various inconveniences.
So unless you have a strange use case where you either want points to be distributed in two places (usually the opposite of what you want) or want the points to be in someone’s account who cannot hold the card as a primary cardholder for some reason (and I guess Cardless is touchy enough about approvals where this isn’t unheard of, like what happened to Nick) Bilt doesn’t offer anything Citi or Wells Fargo doesn’t have for cheaper.
Just to clarify, Citi and Wells have zero ability to share points. And, Bilt has this authorized user trick to “sort of” share points. And, in spite of “sort of” seeming to be better than “zero,” Bilt is the worst. Citi and Wells are not the worst. Hmmm.
Did you actually listen to it? That isn’t what they said.
Go to 21m 16s in the recording. “BILT IS AT THE BOTTOM.”
Go to 21m 45s in the recording. Bilt is one of the three programs that have NO way of sharing points. If someone can’t figure out how to skillfully use the authorized user feature to share points, they need to repeat second grade.
That’s what I thought. You didn’t listen to it. They clearly stated that Citi and Wells Fargo were below Bilt.
So vastly worse than every other implementation, as you need to precommit where you want points to end up. Fine if you just want all the points to end up with 1 person. Problematic if you might want points to end up with other people, say if one person has status that unlocks extra availability but another is the main player, or award booking restrictions like at Qatar.
Oh, and you have to pay an extra annual fee for the privilege of doing so unless you have the worst Bilt card.
And this doesn’t work with points earned from outside the Bilt card.
How about the authors themselves clarify what they meant?
We meant that Bilt is at the bottom of the list along with Citi and Wells Fargo. Bilt was ranked slightly better than the other two but by such a small degree that it is almost a three way tie for last place.
You listened to the whole thing and it still isn’t clear to you? I think they aim their communications to be understandable to the normal listener, not paid Bilt trolls lol.