Bilt Dining: Earn Bonus Points At 20K Restaurants

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I’ve written extensively about the Bilt Mastercard® (review), which is an innovative and rewarding credit card. The greatest selling point of the card is that you can earn points for paying your rent (and anecdotally your HOA as well). Best of all, the points are quite valuable, which is also why this is a card that I applied for.

In this post I wanted to focus on Bilt Dining, which allows you to earn bonus points when dining out at select restaurants. This program has just been expanded considerably, though the changes aren’t all good news.

The basics of Bilt Neighborhood Dining

Several airline, hotel, and travel loyalty programs have dining programs, whereby you can earn bonus points by registering for a dining program, linking an eligible credit card, and then dining at a participating restaurant while paying with your linked card.

One of these concepts is Bilt’s Neighborhood Dining program. This allows you to earn bonus points with Bilt, even if you don’t pay for your dining with the Bilt Mastercard.

Thanks to a recent expansion, there are now around 20,000 restaurants participating in the program, giving members lots of opportunities to earn points. To participate in the Bilt Dining program:

• Bilt members need to add any debit or credit card (American Express, Mastercard, or Visa) to their Bilt account from the “Wallet” tab, and then use it at participating restaurants
• The bonus points you earn with Bilt for this dining are in addition to the rewards you earn with whatever credit card is linked (use the best cards for restaurants and dining)
• To see all the restaurants participating in Bilt Dining, go to the “Neighborhood” tab in the Bilt app, and browse the locations nearest you

The major change here is that in the past, Bilt’s Neighborhood Dining program had a curated list of restaurants, but the list just wasn’t very big, and was heavily focused on only the biggest cities in the country.

That was a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, the restaurants were generally high quality. On the other hand, it limited how engaged people could be in the program, given the small footprint.

What has changed is that Bilt has partnered with Rewards Network, Seated, and more, to add their restaurants to the Bilt portfolio. What this means is that you’ll see a lot of overlap between the restaurants in Bilt Neighborhood Dining and the restaurants through airline and hotel dining rewards portals, like American AAdvantage Dining.

Keep in mind that you can typically only earn rewards through a single dining program for a particular meal. So if you have a card linked to other dining portals as well but prefer to earn with Bilt, go to the Bilt app, and click the toggle to link your Bilt account, and that will unenroll you from other loyalty programs.

Bilt Neighborhood Dining is probably your best bet

There’s honestly not much differentiation between most of these dining programs that offer bonus points for purchases at select restaurants. For the most part, restaurants are paying a certain percentage for each guest who visits through the program, with the idea being that they’re generating incremental business because of it (rather than people just being rewarded for meals they’d have anyway).

Typically programs like Rewards Network make all the agreements with restaurants, and then provide an opportunity for loyalty programs to white label this.

So I think most people decide which program to participate in based on the loyalty program they might be most engaged in. Generally speaking, I do think Bilt might be the most lucrative program for crediting Rewards Network dining:

• Keep in mind you don’t need the Bilt Mastercard to participate in this, as you can sign-up for Bilt without it, and can earn your credit card rewards as usual
• Based on the restaurants I’m looking at, I mostly see the number of points earned with Bilt Rewards to be the same as through other programs; for example, I typically see the ability to earn 2-3x points, whether it’s with Bilt Neighborhood Dining or AAdvantage Dining
• I’d much rather earn Bilt Rewards points, since it’s a transferable points currency, so it gives you a lot more flexibility than other programs, and we also sometimes see transfer bonuses

So while I haven’t used Bilt Dining much in the past, this will become my new default option for dining portals, I think.

Bottom line

The Bilt Neighborhood Dining program has been updated, and now has around 20,000 participating restaurants. This is because Bilt has partnered with programs like Rewards Network, to greatly expand the number of restaurants where you can be rewarded.

While this kind of ruins the “curated” aspect of Bilt Neighborhood Dining, it does greatly expand the selection. Given the value of Bilt points compared to other rewards currencies, I’d probably recommend making this your default program.

What’s your take on Bilt Neighborhood Dining?