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On May 31, 2024, Bilt Rewards “paused” its transfer partnership with Hawaiian Airlines HawaiianMiles. Now, with the Alaska merger with Hawaiian Airlines seemingly imminent, Bilt has confirmed to AwardWallet that it has permanently removed HawaiianMiles as a transfer partner.
Here's what you need to know about this development.
Bilt Confirms Removal of Hawaiian Airlines Partnership
Savvy netizens on Reddit first noticed in May that Bilt added a disclaimer that “Hawaiian Airlines is pausing point transfers starting 5/31”. Rather than retaining this notice, Bilt fully removed Hawaiian Airlines from its list of transfer partners effective June 1.
In response to another Reddit post in early August, a Bilt representative confirmed that it had paused transfer to Hawaiian Airlines:
As of May 31st, we have paused transfers to Hawaiian Airlines. You can continue transferring your Bilt Points to any of our other loyalty transfer partners like Alaska Airlines, United MileagePlus, or Turkish Airlines.
Today, we at AwardWallet were reviewing and updating our list of all transfer partner options and noticed that Bilt had not only removed Hawaiian Airlines from its list of transfer partners but had also deleted its Hawaiian Airlines transfer partner guide:
Looks like this is the closest we're going to get from Bilt that it's eliminated Hawaiian as a transfer partner:: pic.twitter.com/dM11gEMVFL
— JT Genter (@JTGenter) August 20, 2024
Bilt blocks the Internet Archive from tracking its pages. So, we can't be sure when these changes were made. However, the above tweet caught the attention of Richard Kerr (VP of Travel with Bilt Rewards), who clarified the situation.
The legal and manpower overhead required to create a new agreement with HA didn’t make sense for either of us when we were confident the partnership would return shortly.
— Richard Kerr (@KerrPoints) August 20, 2024
According to this statement, Bilt Rewards' three-year agreement with Hawaiian Airlines ended — presumably when the “pause” started on May 31, 2024. Rather than spending the effort to negotiate a new agreement with Hawaiian Airlines, Bilt let the partnership lapse while it waited to see what would happen with Alaska Airlines' merger with Hawaiian Airlines. Speaking of which…
Hawaiian Airlines' Merger With Alaska Airlines
In December 2023, Alaska Airlines announced it was merging with Hawaiian Airlines — although the structure is more of a purchase than a merger. In February 2024, Hawaiian Airlines shareholders approved this acquisition. As of that time, the merger was expected to close sometime between December 2024 and June 2025.
Just today, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it cleared the merger. That advances the deal to a review by the U.S. Department of Transportation for final approval.
As part of the merger, Hawaiian Airlines' HawaiianMiles program is expected to be folded into the Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan program — although we don't know the details of how this will happen.
However, this seems to be what Bilt seems to be banking on in its response to terminating its Hawaiian Airlines partnership. Richard Kerr specifically calls out that Bilt points transfer to Alaska Mileage Plan and:
Given we are the only transfer partner Alaska has at a 1:1 ratio, the ability to book Hawaiian with Bilt points should return shortly.
Remaining Transfer Partners
Bilt Rewards points currently transfer to 21 partners: 16 airlines and five hotel programs. Here's the current list of Bilt transfer partners:
If you're still hoping to transfer points into the HawaiianMiles program before the program is folded, you've still got options:
Bottom Line
Bilt Rewards has permanently removed Hawaiian Airlines HawaiianMiles as a transfer partner. The last time Bilt Rewards members could transfer Bilt points to HawaiianMiles was May 31, 2024. While it's unclear when Bilt decided to end this partnership permanently, today was the first day that Bilt Rewards publicly confirmed that this partnership is no more.
Considering the Alaska-Hawaiian Airlines merger is moving forward, the combined airline plans to phase out the HawaiianMiles program, and Bilt's contract with Hawaiian Airlines ended, it makes total sense for Bilt Rewards to end this partnership until the Alaska-Hawaiian merger was completed.
But Bilt's lack of communication is concerning to us. Bilt could have left HawaiianMiles on its list of transfer partners with a note that transfers were temporarily unavailable. Instead, it stealthily deleted references to this partnership without notice, making it seem like Hawaiian Airlines was never a partner. Bilt never communicated the ending of this partnership to its members — not even in small print at the bottom of an email, like it recently did with a change to the Bilt Rent Day earnings cap.
The Bilt Rewards program has a lot going for it — particularly for renters. However, we'd like better communication from the program going forward, even when it's bad news.
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