Japan Airlines is now a Bilt Rewards transfer partner

Here is something that I speculatively wrote about several weeks ago, and has now been officially confirmed through an update on the Bilt Rewards website: Japan Airlines is now a Bilt Rewards transfer partner! This is quite exciting, so let’s have a quick look…

Japan Airlines becomes the latest Bilt transfer partner

Bilt is best known for its Bilt credit card which allows you to earn points over paying rent. Yes, for those who never heard of Bilt, you read it right: you can use your Bilt credit card to pay rent. This unlocks thousands of points that before you would have not been able to earn. And the nice things is that as long as you use the Bilt Rewards Account, you don’t actually need to use the Bilt credit card itself to pay the rent – you can use most any card.

Now, crucially, Bilt has a selection of rewards transfer partners in the travel sector, with some nice options, most notably Alaska Airlines, amongst some other useful ones, such as Aeroplan and Flying Blue. Now there is another great option, namely Japan Airlines. The JAL logo has already appeared on the Bilt Rewards Transfer page, and it seems that this option is already live for 1:1 transfers from Bilt to Japan Airlines’ Mileage Bank.

What is JAL Mileage Bank good for?

So why should you be excited about this? Principally to redeem your points for flights on JAL. booking JAL flights from the US has sometimes been challenging, given that JAL is not a partner to any big banks in the US, and otherwise only partners with American Airlines and Alaska, which themselves also aren’t partners to the big US banks with lucrative rewards currencies (think Chase, Citibank or Amex). So, miles are difficult to accrue for all of these airlines.

Then, once you do get miles on Alaska or American by either flying with them or transferring miles from Bilt to Alaska, the major disadvantage of these airlines’ loyalty programs is that their schedules open up about 11 months out for bookings. This is problematic because JAL opens its calendar 360 days out, so by the time that you can start booking your reward flight with Alaska or American, those business and first class seats are all scooped up already!

So is it impossible to book such reward tickets with Alaska and American? No, but it required some risk-taking by being last minute, and a lot of monitoring (or luck).

Instead, we did have the option to book through Cathay Pacific, which partners with some credit card currencies and also opens its schedule 360 days out, however their prices are somewhat inflated compared with Alaska and American. For example, you may redeem 105.000 points on Cathay Pacific for a seat that costs 80.000 through Alaska…

Now enter JAL mileage bank. The good news now is that you can transfer your Bilt pints directly to JAL and book your reward ticket 360 days in advance, increasing your chances to score these reward tickets for a better price. This is why this addition to Bilt is exciting! Additionally, from what I can see, ‘saver’ awards at JAL Mileage Bank start at 75.000 points plus ~$230 in taxes and fees, so while the number of points may be slightly lower than on Alaska, the taxes and fees could be quite a bit higher.

Some things to be aware of…

Do note that normally JAL wil make you wait 60 days after first opening your JAL mileage bank account before you can redeem your miles for anything. So, if you have any plan to redeem, create your JAL mileage bank account today to ensure that you’ll be able to redeem as needed. That said, Bilt apparently talked JAL down to a 7-day wait period for bikt transfers, if your account is younger than 60 days. Still, you wouldn’t want to transfer your points in anticipation only to find out you can’t redeem them immediately.

Summary

JAL Mileage Bank has become the newest transfer partner for Bilt Rewards, offering 360-day out redeeming of JAL flights – previously this was only possible with programs such as Cathay Pacific’s Asia Miles, but at a steeper cost. So, this is an exciting opportunity and I would encourage all of you interested in redeeming JAL Mileagebank Miles for travel to Japan or beyond to open an account ASAP, so as to get around the 60-day ‘hold’ period for new accounts.