Bilt Rent Day: Is the Avios Transfer Bonus Actually Worth It?
This is the November 30, 2025 edition of the LazyPoints Weekly newsletter. It goes out by email every Sunday at 8:00 a.m. Pacific–unless I oversleep–and is archived here on the blog. Want it straight to your inbox each week? Sign up here.
I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving! We’re taking it pretty easy this week while we gear up for the Holidays. But we don’t want you to miss out on a solid Bilt Rent Day, so let’s go over tomorrow’s big offering.
If you have a Bilt card or Bilt points (you don’t need a Bilt card to earn them!), get ready for Rent Day on Monday, December 1st, 2025. As usual on the first of the month, Bilt is offering:
Double points (up to 1,000 bonus points) on non-rent Bilt Mastercard spending
A chance to win free rent via the in-app Rent Free gameshow
Free coffee at Bilt HQ and pastries at Mercado Little Spain (while supplies last)
Rotating special events (dining, comedy, fitness, and more)
The headline this month is a transfer bonus to Avios airlines, specifically British Airways, Aer Lingus, and Iberia, and it’s a pretty intriguing one! The bonus varies by Bilt status:
There’s also a status-based bonus on gift cards, but they generally offer poor value, even with the bonus.
Why you should care
Avios, the shared points currency of seven different airlines, are quite flexible, in that you can transfer them freely between multiple major frequent flyer programs to find the best redemption. There are a few sweet spots, especially off-peak Iberia business class flights between Boston or New York and Spain for 40,000 Avios with reasonable fees—less than 30,000 Avios with even the lowest Rent Day transfer bonus. Through Tuesday, Iberia is even offering a sale, with award flights to Europe as low as 6,400 Avios one way.
Avios can be used to book domestic American Airlines flights through British Airways (in theory), and short-haul flights within Europe. The latter can be particularly useful for positioning flights. Virgin offers cheap flights to London, but flying long-haul out of London usually requires paying exorbitant fees. But you can use less Avios to fly within Europe (for example, I found a flight to Dublin for 9750 points and $1 in fees on my very first search) and book a long-haul flight home from there, likely with much more tolerable cash costs. The Avios programs also have some long-haul business class options on partner airlines like Japan Airlines, although the taxes and fees can often be quite expensive.
Why you should be careful
Despite their use cases, Avios are definitely not LazyPoints-approved, and are better suited to intermediate and advanced points travelers. I try to avoid headaches when redeeming points, and Avios tend to give me one. I have found it difficult to find award availability (domestic American Airlines flights seem to be available between some AA hubs, but never from my home airports), and the booking process has been hard to navigate and prone to glitches in my experience. Taxes and fees on some awards can be exorbitant, especially when flying to Japan or booking British Airways flights. And the points expire after 36 months, although it’s pretty easy to extend their shelf life.
Lazy take 🦥
If you’re not an experienced Avios-user, I would suggest making sure you have a solid redemption strategy in mind before taking advantage of this transfer bonus. But if you can find and use those sweet spots, this could be an attractive opportunity.
This week on the blog 📝
I talked about some ways to protect your purchases and maximize your rewards when Black Friday shopping. Speaking of Black Friday, I wrote a quick post about Thrifty Traveler, which is offering a particularly good sale on their deal-alert service, which I have been using for years.
Quick Points of the Week ⚡
Extra points 🪙
Earn $4 in cashback with Rakuten. Just download Perplexity’s browser and add the Rakuten extension. (Doctor of Credit)
Deals 🏷️
Black Friday airfare sales. It can be tough to cut through the noise of Black Friday travel sales. None stood out to me, considering you can usually fly to Europe for $500. AerLingus and TAP seem to have solid offerings. It’s a great time to run a flexible-date search on Google Flights or try out their new AI-powered deal search.
Last chance ⏳
No more Delta miles on Turo rentals. The airline and the car sharing service are ending their partnership at the end of the year. (Frequent Miler)
Fun 👻
Lufthansa unveils 100th-anniversary paint scheme. It’s a plane! It’s a bird! (OMAAT)
Sign-up bonus of the Week 🎯
The 125,000-point welcome offer on the Chase Sapphire Reserve is already outstanding, but Doctor of Credit reports that you might be able to get up to 175,000 points if you are eligible and apply via “pre-approvals” on Chase’s website (maybe more in-branch, for very select customers).
If you are considering the Sapphire Reserve, it may be worth checking to see if you are eligible for the higher bonus. If you’re not considering the card, it might be worth checking to see if you have a 175k offer on the table. While I’m not a huge fan of this new and complicated Sapphire Reserve, 50,000 extra points ($500+ in value) can make up for a lot of shortcomings.
Other great current bonuses
100k points on the Capital One Venture X (our take: 🔥🔥🔥🔥)
100k points on the Citi Strata Elite (our take: 🔥🔥🔥)
125k points on the Chase Sapphire Reserve (our take: 🔥🔥🔥)
175k points on the Hilton Aspire (our take: 🔥🔥)
75k points on the Chase Sapphire Preferred (our take: 🔥)
$250 gift card on the Amazon Prime Visa (our take: 🔥)
$300 (kind of) on Capital One no-fee cards (our take) ends Dec. 9
Up to 100/175k on the Amex Gold/Platinum (our take)
Enjoy the weekend! 🦥
May your Cyber Monday bring you great deals and bonus points. 🛍️