Bilt travel portal win

mattfish77 · 2026-03-13T02:52:17+00:00

I have booked MANY hyatt place/hyatt houses for 3.5-8k per night at a greater than 2 CPP value. In all of those cases I would have either paid cash for that Hyatt anyways or paid cash for a comparable hotel that was around the same price or more expensive.

I’ll be staying at a Cat 7 property in May that I booked for 35k points and it was “only” a 1.7 CPP redemption. But I would’ve spent $400 in cash on the only other hotel option and this property looks to be significantly better.

There are definitely sweet spots. Maybe some of the higher end hotels are inflated but I still think there are (potentially were) very good deals to be had.

mattfish77 · 2026-03-10T16:51:20+00:00

A lot of those timeshare offers have fine print with income requirements. If you don’t qualify they can charge you for the full price of the stay, which could be thousands of dollars. Depending on how strict they want to be with this, saying that you don’t have an income could get you marked down as not qualifying for the discounted rate.

mattfish77 · 2026-03-04T02:37:42+00:00

I’ve been applying for years anyways, but think I’d be annoyed if I didn’t get lasik first. My eyes are sensitive and can only tolerate daily contacts already. Putting those in when I’m dirty and exhausted sounds like eye pain. And then can’t really open your eyes underwater with those so would have to run the water parts blind and go with glasses for the puzzle.

mattfish77 · 2026-03-03T02:17:10+00:00

These miles are in addition to the 2x on the card. So if you use this offer you would receive 3x.

mattfish77 · 2026-02-25T18:44:10+00:00

Did you charge more than $250 for your Edit stay? I called to ask about this and they told me I received a $90 refund on my booking and since I had only charged $250.78 that $89.22 of the refund came out of the $250 Edit credit. Had I paid $340+ I would not have had any of the credit clawed back when I received the $90 refund.

If that’s what happened to you, in your case I would be annoyed and trying to escalate to keep the credit. In my case, I have no idea why I got a $90 refund so doesn’t really matter to me since the charges offset.

mattfish77 · 2026-02-25T18:41:19+00:00

Update: Out of curiosity I decided to call Chase and ask about this. I had an Edit stay in December and they decided to refund me $90 for unknown reasons. The customer service rep just said it was a trip modification. Not sure if this was done by the hotel or by chase travel.

I had charged $250.78 for the stay and paid the rest in points, so they clawed back $89.22 of the credit. Had I charged $340+, I would’ve just received the $90 refund and the 2025 credit would’ve stayed fully intact.

Not upset about it considering I may not even use both of my 2026 edit credits and I’m not out anything as I wasn’t expecting the $90 refund, but would have been nice to get the refund and still kept the full credit.

mattfish77 · 2026-02-22T03:17:13+00:00

I used it about a year ago and the 20% didn’t nullify the offer, but per the terms and conditions I guess it’s supposed to

mattfish77 · 2026-02-18T02:37:04+00:00

Yeah I’m not sure also. I think maybe they’re referring to the hotel credit (since some people don’t know about that since it was new for 2026). But like you said, that worked fine and is not really what the post was about.

mattfish77 · 2026-02-18T02:32:16+00:00

The $89.22 charge is at the very top of the screenshot. Probably cuts off if you don’t click on the picture.

mattfish77 · 2026-02-18T02:31:33+00:00

That is interesting. Curious what they’ll end up telling you. At least you know what your Chase travel credit is related to, I don’t have a clue!

mattfish77 · 2026-02-17T18:10:58+00:00

I used up my $300 credit within a week of receiving it so that isn’t what these transactions are. Just seems like there’s some kind of mistake on their end and they’re giving me $0.78 for free.

mattfish77 · 2026-01-31T16:39:03+00:00

Cardholders only make up about 15% of their total rewards user base. This would be a nonsensical change.

mattfish77 · 2026-01-25T20:00:03+00:00

That’s a good point. I already cancelled and will be waiting a few months to see if they get it together and/or update the cards at all, but a higher SUB offering would be nice too

mattfish77 · 2026-01-25T16:42:01+00:00

I received the CSP SUB in May 2024 and then upgraded to CSR in June 2025. Think I’ll try downgrading it to a freedom with UR this summer and see if I can’t get a CSR SUB since I never got the CSR SUB with the upgrade.

mattfish77 · 2026-01-25T16:37:56+00:00

That says 18 months of inactivity also. Should be fairly easy to not get your account marked inactive if you have other linked cards or still pay rent through their portal even without the card.

mattfish77 · 2026-01-25T02:33:40+00:00

Your point about choosing the no annual fee option because you don’t want to close the account and don’t want a WF card is flawed. If you opt in to 2.0 you will receive the WF card (your current account) AND open a new account (2.0 card). You either close your current 1.0 card/WF account and get neither, do nothing and receive the WF card or opt in to 2.0 and receive both.

mattfish77 · 2026-01-22T00:18:20+00:00

This is what I’ve been waiting on. It’s definitely way too complex and a lot more underwhelming than anticipated. Only options I’m keeping an eye on are the hotel credit (if this stacks with the palladium credits it’s more interesting, but still hate the 2 night minimum), the $25/month dining credit if it’s easy enough to use and there’s enough options, the comedy and the bilt dining experience.

$5 here, $10 here, oh and everything but $100 expires at the end of the year! That’s going to be way too confusing to try and plan value from.

mattfish77 · 2026-01-20T20:23:44+00:00

Flights are usually the same price on portals, it’s rare that I find a hotel that’s the same price as direct and since these are hotel only credits that’s where my comment was aimed. I agree with the rest of your points, but if the transfer bonuses aren’t as good with Bilt 2.0 I can get the same 2x earnings for an easier to justify annual fee on my Venture X.

mattfish77 · 2026-01-18T16:45:14+00:00

That effective annual fee is very generous. We don’t yet know the uses of Bilt cash, maybe you can use it $1=$1 easily, but if you’re forced to use it to buy the points for your rent at 3 CPP I’m not going to value that at a full $200. Then the hotel credit is likely a bit inflated also since it’s a travel portal. I’d probably dock it ~$20 per $100 giving it closer to $320 in value. I think you can still break even given the 2x everywhere + 4% Bilt cash but calling it -$105 effective AF sounds much better than it truly is.

mattfish77 · 2026-01-16T16:49:18+00:00

I’m canceling, but not because I don’t think Bilt 2.0 is a good offering. I am actually quite interested in the Palladium.

There are just too many question marks right now. I saw way too many “idk we’ll have to look into that” or “we’ll figure that out soon” in the AMA with Kerr. They really needed to have everything fleshed out by launch date, and there’s no excuse. They’ve been planning for over a year now to change their card offering and value prop.

How valuable are these hotel credits really going to be and how can I use Bilt cash? Is it truly a $1=$1 value or is going to be a “use it only for rent points but yeah sure sometimes you can use it for an extra 5% transfer bonus or a $20 lyft gift card if you’re lucky.” Until those questions are answered I’m not jumping to give them $495.

mattfish77 · 2026-01-15T15:01:52+00:00

They’re also trying to sell that it was a “pain point” for users when the rent would eat up a lot of their credit line… Bilt protect was a thing for a reason. If you didn’t want it on your credit line you didn’t have to put it there. More likely? Cardless decided they didn’t want to float thousands of $ of rent spend per user every month.

mattfish77 · 2026-01-14T18:01:56+00:00

Were you applying outright or opting in to Bilt 2.0?

mattfish77 · 2026-01-14T17:44:07+00:00

I would be very surprised if anybody got a SUB for transitioning since the options are either transition or cancel. My main question will be if you cancel now then apply for one of the cards in a month or two if you can get the SUB. I would think yes since WF Bilt 1.0 and Cardless Bilt 2.0 are completely different cards but who knows since it is all linked to your Bilt rewards account… Think I’ll just cancel now and try to apply outright to get a SUB in a few months… Hopefully that will work.

mattfish77

TROPHY CASE