It’s no secret that I love the Bilt Mastercard. The ability to pay your rent with a credit card for no fee and earn points on it is incredible. They have 11 airline and 3 hotel partners which you can transfer your points to as well as very lucrative transfer bonuses throughout the year. However, they just quietly removed Hawaiian Airlines as a transfer partner.

Department of Justice Clears Alaska Airlines to Acquire Hawaiian Airlines

While this doesn’t make things any better, this may offer some clarity on why Bilt dropped Hawaiian. Yesterday it was reported that the DOJ decided not to challenge the roughly $1 billion merger of Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian. So, what did Bilt do? They just removed Hawaiian as a transfer partner from their website without telling anyone. This was first noticed by JT Genter at Award Wallet and had a bit of back and forth on X with Richard Kerr, head of Loyalty at Bilt.

On one hand, I get Bilt not wanting to renew a partnership that takes a lot of time and effort to renew that will be back once the merger is complete between Hawaiian and Alaska but it’s just a bad look.

Yes, you can still transfer American Express points to Hawaiian and there is even a 20% transfer bonus through the end of August. While using Hawaiian miles is a pretty niche redemption but I’m not a fan of removing transfer partners whatever the reason may be.

What Does the Future Hold for Hawaiian and Alaska?

While the Department of Transportation still has to approve the merger, the airlines hope to finalize everything by June of 2025. If the merger does go through, Alaska would still be the fifth largest airline in the US and have 50% market share in Hawaii. It is expected that Hawaiian and Alaska will maintain their separate brands as that was one of the agreements to get the blessing from the State of Hawaii. The hope is that Hawaiian’s frequent flyer program will be converted into Alaska’s Mileage Plan program which would be a big win for consumers. Even if you don’t ever step foot on an Alaska Airlines plane, their miles are extremely valuable for travel on their partner airlines. That’s one of the reasons I have their Alaska Airlines Visa.

Wrapping Up

Bilt quietly removed Hawaiian from their list of transfer partners yesterday. While it sucks to lose them, you can still easily get Hawaiian miles by transferring them from American Express.