April Rent Day!
Tl;dr: Be sure to take advantage of Bilt’s recurring benefits and this month’s transfer benefit if you are planning an Avios-based trip; but the points probably aren’t good enough to justify a speculative transfer.
Bilt’s Rent Day is tomorrow, and that means the usual suite of goodies are back: double points on non-rent purchases (up to 1,000 bonus points), a chance to win free rent with the Rent Free game show, and various free fitness classes (slots go fast!).
What’s new this month?
The highlight bonus this month? A massive transfer bonus to British Airways, Aer Lingus, and Iberia:
50% for Blue (base) members
60% for Silver members
75% for Gold members
100% for Platinum members
That means even if you have no status at all, you can turn 50,000 Bilt points into 75,000 Avios. Members with status can earn even more, with Platinum members receiving 100,000 Avios for the same 50,000 Bilt points. Once transferred, Avios are freely interchangeable between not only these three airlines, but also Qatar and Finnair. When held as BA, Aer Lingus, or Qatar Avios, they won’t expire for 36 months, and can be extended with qualifying activity.
Is it a good deal?
With such a big bonus and long shelf life, is it worth transferring your Bilt points tomorrow? If you were already planning to book a trip with Avios, certainly! Otherwise… maybe? Plenty of sites will tell you all sorts of ways to use Avios to get maximum value. But they can be tricky to redeem, and I’ve never found a use case personally.
For example, I’m looking at trips to Europe 🇪🇺 for the fall. For now, I have a refundable trip to Madrid booked, but I’m looking for a better deal. Here’s a flight I found available with Avios (it’s a bit of a pain to search for Avios deals without paying for a subscription from something like Roame):
These flights run about $850 at this time of year in main cabin. With the 50% bonus, you could book this flight for about 55.5k Bilt points, for a value of 1¢ each. With the 75% bonus, the value is a more palatable 1.2¢ each—solid, but nothing to write home about. You could simply book a similar flight through the Bilt platform for 68,000 Bilt points. That costs more Bilt points, but doesn’t require any cash out of pocket, and delivers a better value at 1.25¢ each.
If you can find them, though, there are deals to be had. For example, we just used 75k Alaska miles and about $75 in cash per ticket to fly to Japan 🇯🇵 on JAL. Here’s a similar flight available with Avios:
With main cabin fares to Japan coming around $1,300 recently, the Alaska redemption nets a value of roughly 1.6¢/pt. This BA redemption comes in at roughly 1.7¢/pt. With the 50% transfer bonus though? Then you’d need about 33.5k points, and those Bilt points would be valued at roughly 2.5¢ per point. With a 100% Platinum bonus? 3.3¢/pt.
But per-point value isn’t the be-all, end-all. In the real world, it’s a tougher pill to swallow to fork out nearly $900 in cash for two tickets to Japan when we could use Alaska points transferred from Bilt and pay less than $150 out of pocket. Our Alaska miles also never expire, and we can cancel the ticket if our plans change, while BA charges a $55 fee. What’s more, flying on JAL with Alaska miles gets us halfway to elite status just based on that one free flight. Even with this huge bonus, I’d choose the Alaska redemption.
Conclusion
This month’s highlight transfer bonus could be huge for the right person, but most people will probably want to skip it. There are some great opportunities to redeem Avios, but they are usually tricky to redeem or limited to niche situations or both. As always, though, Rent Day is a great day to make those necessary purchases you’ve been putting off and take advantage of double points on what was already one of the best cards on the market.