It’s Almost Rent Day!

Tl;dr: In addition to the usual benefits, the best bonus this month is a 50% bonus with Avianca LifeMiles.

It’s Rent Day tomorrow, which means there’s bonus points to be earned and special perks to take advantage if you have a Bilt card or otherwise earn Bilt Rewards. As always, there’s double points on non-rent purchases and the Rent Free game for a chance to win free rent. There’s also a collection of minor perks that you can review here. But the big stars are transfer bonuses to two airlines this month: Avianca and Virgin. But are these bonuses worth taking advantage of?

Avianca

This month, Bilt members—regardless of status level!—can transfer their points to Avianca with a 50% bonus. I am not a huge fan of Avianca, as their website has historically been very buggy anytime I’ve tried to use it. However, this month’s Bilt bonus prompted me to give it another shot. And I’m glad I did, because, at least with this bonus, transfers to Avianca can absolutely make sense.

I spent about 10 minutes on this, running five searches on the LifeMiles site. I simply plugged in my home airport (SFO) and a random week in February (the 8th to the 16th) and saw what happened. Results to Santiago, Chile, and Frankfurt, Germany were underwhelming. But I had great luck with searches to Lima (Peru), Medellín (Colombia), and Buenos Aires (Argentina). All three had flights available on the exact date I had chosen at random.

The flight to Lima cost 50k miles and $105 in taxes and fees. With the Bilt bonus, it would cost only 33k Bilt points round-trip. The cash value of the cheapest ticket to Lima on the same dates was $615m so that’s a value of about 1.5¢/pt.

The flight to Medellín was only 27k miles, or 18k Bilt points with the bonus, and $125. With the cheapest cash ticket to Medellín costing $507, that’s a value of 2.1¢/pt.

Flying to Buenos Aires, meanwhile, cost 73k miles, 48k Bilt points, plus $67. The cheapest cash ticket, meanwhile, came in at a whopping $1225, for a 2.4¢/pt value.

Check the prices from your own home airport, of course, but this transfer bonus might be worth taking advantage of if you’re aiming to visit South America in the near future.

Virgin

Unlike the Avianca bonus, the Virgin bonus this month depends on your Bilt status level. Blue status, which is the starting level, includes a 20% bonus, with Silver members receiving 40%, Gold member getting 60%, and 100% for Platinum members.

Although I occasionally see great deals on Virgin redemptions from Thrifty Traveler, they are fairly few and far between. Virgin has few good redemption options in economy (I searched several European cities and every redemption entailed over $400 in fees), and even in premium cabins deals can be hard to find without a ton of work.

For example, if you want a discount on a $5,173 Upper Class flight to London, you could use 135k Virgin miles and $2,400(!) in taxes and fees. That’s 67,500-112,500 Bilt points depending on the status bonus rate, or 2.5-4.1¢ in “value.” I also recently found some flights to Europe and back in business class for 156k Virgin miles and $150 in taxes and fees. That’s 78k-130k Bilt points with this bonus, and 3.7-6.2¢ in face value compared the cash price of that ticket. So it is possible to wring some value out of the Virgin bonus, and, since their points don’t expire, it may make sense for certain people (big spenders with Platinum or Gold-level bonuses) to take advantage of this Rent Day benefit, but most people will be better off without it.

Conclusion

This month’s Rent Day offers a solid Avianca bonus that can offer excellent value, and is open to all members equally to boot. Rent Day double points is a great deal for a no-fee card all on it's own, and not every Rent Day can be the greatest thing since sliced bread, so a big bonus that potentially unlocks a whole continent is an excellent first of the month in my book.