I personally think it's a big miss if they don't allow you to apply Bilt Cash in some form to their restaurant network. They are really pumping this neighborhood thing in all the marketing materials - and the restaurant offering makes up the vast majority of their local network of merchants. As mentioned upthread though, it seems Bilt Cash applied to dining is reserved for restaurants offering Bilt Checkout, which as far as I can tell, is a few dozen in total across the entire country. It would not be hard to offer charge offsets for these transactions on the card statement - they already can identify these transactions, just let customers apply Bilt Cash as a credit.

Typing this out though makes me wonder if they actually are going to do this and make it a cardmember exclusive. The Wells card is almost done, so they have no incentive to implement it there. And for those that don't have a card and thus can't be reimbursed dollar for dollar... the only way they can control what the customer is charged and apply Bilt Cash to the transaction is if they own the checkout system... which is exactly how you're allowed to use Bilt Cash on restaurants today.

Edit: I'll also add my general thoughts on the card. We charge about 100k/yr on all cards. The majority of that is non-category spend like taxes, insurance, charitable contributions, and the like. Dining takes up about 10% and groceries a little more than that. I currently direct most non-category spend to the World of Hyatt card with the intent of earning enough elite nights to qualify for milestone awards like suite upgrades and globalist status. If I directed all spend to the palladium card, I'd be looking at around $4k of Bilt Cash and that's a pretty sizable chunk of change to spend on their hotel portal - on hotels across any brand. That's on top of 200k Bilt points that could be directed to Hyatt, Alaska, JAL, or anywhere it is most convenient.

Even if the hotel portal is somewhat more expensive, say it's really $3k of value from that $4k of Bilt Cash... that's still a ton of value on top of the Bilt points. You're also going to top out status at that spend level so you qualify for the highest transfer bonuses when offered. For high spenders this card seems almost too good to be true. I suppose they could screw around with partners and transfer ratios - that is what I would be most concerned about moving forward.

This was basically my thinking as well. For high spenders, you are essentially taking care of both flights and hotels with one card/spend outlay. Okay, 200K points is generally not enough to fly a family of 4-5 abroad in a premium cabin roundtrip, but as you mentioned, the Bilt Platinum 75-100%+ transfer bonuses would ideally help with that. I also don't see how this could be sustainable unless they're struck some unbelievably lucrative deals with the partners to offload points at bargain basement prices. So my concern is also that they will devalue partners or ratios, or perhaps totally get rid of transfer bonuses.

Tomorrow's the big day! Hope everyone's excited for find out, officially, just how nerfed we all soon shall be!

I am a Bilt power user, it's my primary card, and even I'm dropping it here

Don't insult everyone's intelligence by pretending there's still no transaction fee to pay rent.

The cards themselves are just ok versions of other existing cards (Palladium is a Venture X, Obsidian is a CSP). They should have put more innovation into cards people want to spend on vs time on an innovative way to hide having a transaction fee.

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