Bilt has been undergoing many changes lately, from adding Alaska Air as a transfer partner to devaluing rent days and more. In one of its more recent changes, Bilt dropped Hawaiian as a transfer partner without warning. Despite the undiplomatic way they made the change, their reasoning is mostly sound.
Bilt is a great program to be a part of if you pay rent or frequently make other qualifying payments. This is primarily due to its excellent collection of transfer partners. However, the company has been going through a period of change recently, adopting a new credit card issuer (who isn’t happy about its profitability) and devaluing its Rent Day promotion. However, recently, Bilt dropped Hawaiian as a transfer partner and did so without giving customers prior notice. While not an ideal situation, I do understand why they did this.
Bilt Dropped Hawaiian as a Transfer Partner
As reported by Miles to Memories, Bilt dropped Hawaiian as a transfer partner around a week ago without so much as an email informing customers of the change. The reason for this, as explained by Bilt’s Vice President of Travel, Richard Kerr, is simply because their 3-year contract with Hawaiian was expiring, and with the pending merger, they didn’t see a reason to go through the work and costs of drawing up another contract with the airline. He goes on to say that the company is confident the merger will go through, and, thus, the ability to book Hawaiian will return soon.
While I agree with Kerr’s take, contracts have defined end dates. The Bilt team definitely knew when their agreement was going to end and likely knew for some time now that they weren’t going to renew it. So, why not take a comparatively minuscule amount of time to notify customers that they’ll stop partnering with Hawaiian ahead of time? Were they afraid a glut of panic transfers would have negative impacts on their financial performance? Or are they just really this bad at communication?
Moreover, while I share Kerr’s confidence that the Alaska-Hawaiian combination will happen, there’s no telling how long it’ll take to merge the loyalty programs. For example, with Continental and United, they began merging operations in “2011.” Their single air operator’s certificate was issued in November 2011, and their frequent flier systems, along with passenger systems and website, consolidated in March 2012. So, despite what Kerr says, Hawaiian could be off-limits to Bilt members for the better part of a year (or even longer).
Final Thoughts
Now that Bilt dropped Hawaiian as a transfer partner, there isn’t much those who were looking at doing a transfer can do. But this is just the name of the game, especially nowadays. Of course, if you have American Express Membership Rewards points, those may still be transferred to HawaiianMiles. Just be aware that I largely expect that relationship to go away once HawaiianMiles is merged into Alaska Mileage Plan. So, either way, if you’ve been eyeing a HawaiianMiles redemption, you might not want to wait on that too long if you can.