April was a month of us getting back into our lives after our Spring Break trip. It felt like a whirlwind of trying to catch up on work, getting our house back in order, and just getting back into the routine of our normal lives. Our son Alex is a Junior in High School, and I swear, between tennis, his two orchestras, and the musical he was involved in, we were exhausted from attending his meets and concerts. I’m not sure how he survived, to be honest. On top of that, our daughter Emma is looking to buy a house and has a ton of questions for us. In addition, I think it rained nonstop for the entire month. Ugh, I need another vacation, that’s for sure.
We’ve decided to take it a little easy for a while on travel. We don’t have any trips outside of the country planned for the rest of the year. That feels like a bummer, but honestly, we have a lot of college visits to go on for Alex, and Jenn is planning a girls’ trip to Portland to celebrate Emma turning 21 earlier this year. I’m sure we will also take a camping trip here or there during the summer, so really, us taking it easy isn’t really taking it easy.
Wyndham Devalued?
When preparing for this point check, I came across something that surprised me. I use The Points Guy’s valuations to do the analysis of how much our points are worth, and suddenly, the value of Wyndham points fell from 1.1 cents per point to .65 cents per point. This change happened because they now use data from Gondola (a hotel search and booking platform) to determine the average value of those points.
Wyndham is a little weird in that it only really has three pricing levels: 7,500, 15,000, and 30,000 points per night. Obviously, their cash prices are quite a bit more variable than that, so the value per point will vary wildly. In addition, if you have a Wyndham Business Earner card, which Jenn does have, you get a 10% discount on points bookings, making those points 10% more valuable.
In all fairness, this seemed inevitable. The greatest use of Wyndham points was to book Vacasa vacation rentals, where you could easily get 1.5 to 2.5 cents per point value. That partnership is no longer available, so the value of the points needed to come down eventually. I’m just not sure why The Points Guy waited so long to do it.
It does change the math of whether the Wyndham Business Earner card is worth it. We get 8x on Gas and 5x on utilities, which is how we use this card. Prior to the value going down, it was like getting a 8.8% return on gas and a 5.5% return on utilities. Now it calculates out at 5.2% back on gas and 3.25% back on utilities. Just switching those to the Bilt Palladium card at 2x points worth 2.2 cents per point means 4.4% back on gas and utilities. With the point accelerator, it’s 6.6% back on both. It really feels like we would be better off switching that spend to the Bilt Palladium instead.
Building Clarity About Bilt
Bilt Rewards is a difficult program to understand. We have the Bilt Palladium Card, which is 2x Bilt Points and 4x Bilt Cash on everything. Sounds simple-ish, but the Bilt Cash can be used for a variety of things, like discounts on experiences, hotel credits, or as a point accelerator. You can also earn points on your rent or mortgage by paying through the Bilt ACH process and paying a fee using the Bilt Cash you earn on each transaction. In addition, on Rent Day (the first of the month), all transactions on the card get double points, or 4x Bilt Points.
All of these complications have made the Bilt Palladium card a controversial card. Some people find value in using the Bilt Cash for discounts, others use it to boost their point earnings. Many people find it to be annoying and complicated. We’ve decided to use most of the Bilt Cash to boost our points earnings by running our mortgage payments through the Bilt ACH and using the Points Accelerator. Doing that resulted in us earning 3.3x on all spending on this card last month, and I assume going forward, it will be around that amount.
The Bilt Palladium card has a $495 annual fee, and honestly, if you had a credit card that earned 3.3x on everything in Bilt Points, I would probably be willing to pay around $250 per year for that card without any premium benefits. This is primarily because Bilt Points are so valuable. What this means to me is that I would want to get an additional $245 worth of use from its benefits to make up for the elevated annual fee. There are two $200 hotel coupons that we hope to use, but to us, the unlimited Priority Pass for three people is a great perk. We don’t have any of the premium travel credit cards that come with unlimited lounge visits, and they are definitely cracking down on lounge visits for those holding mid-range cards, so it’s getting harder and harder to get into lounges. We travel often enough that I think I would pay $245 for this version of the Priority Pass – it would definitely save us $245 in food and drinks in airports throughout the year. If we use the hotel credits, that’s great, but the card is still worth it for us if we don’t.
On to the Point Check!
Because I do these points checks based on when the statement for each of these credit cards ends, some of the spending from April actually includes spending that occurred on our vacation in March. Our spending is a little elevated because of that. Looking at the points earned on cards that we aren’t spending on to get a signup bonus, we had a good month of using the correct cards. Using the Bilt Palladium for everyday spending and using the Citi Custom Cash for dining (*cough cough* visiting breweries) gains nice returns. Getting an overall 6.8% return on spend is pretty good.
| Card Used | Spend | Points Earned | Point Value | Points Per $ | Return on Spend |
| Bilt Palladium | $2,517 | 8,365 | $184.03 | 3.3 | 7.3% |
| Amex Gold | $555 | 786 | $15.72 | 1.4 | 2.8% |
| Ink Cash | $507 | 2,534 | $51.95 | 5.0 | 10.3% |
| Custom Cash | $504 | 2,464 | $46.82 | 4.9 | 9.3% |
| Wyndham Business Earner | $367 | 1,835 | $11.93 | 5.0 | 3.25% |
| Chase Sapphire | $222 | 461 | $9.45 | 2.1 | 4.3% |
| Blue Business Plus | $118 | 236 | $4.72 | 2.0 | 4.0% |
| Total | $4,790 | 16,681 | $324.61 | 3.5 | 6.8% |
Last month, I made a mistake in my points spreadsheet and forgot to include the value of Bilt points in our totals, which meant I underrepresented the value of our points by about $1,400. Oopsie. When I found the error, I was obviously happy that our points were worth more, but making an Excel mistake is a little embarrassing for someone who spends a decent amount of time looking at spreadsheets. Anyway, aside from the spending listed above, Jenn spent over $700 on her Atmos card, earning a little over 700 Atmos points, and I spent $2,900 on my Iberia card and earned around 3,200 Avios and the bonus of 75,000 Avios. That leaves us with:
- 255,800 Chase Ultimate Reward Points
- 223,400 IHG Points
- 104,800 Wyndham Points
- 92,600 American Airlines Miles
- 89,900 Amex Membership Rewards Points
- 83,800 Atmos Miles
- 81,800 Avios
- 72,700 Bilt Points
- 22,300 Citi Thank You Points
- 19,300 United Miles
- 15,900 Marriott Bonvoy Points
- 1,500 Delta Miles
- 300 Hyatt Points
- $133 Cash Back
All of these points added together, according to the Points Guy valuations are worth $15,500, up from a revised $14,500 in March. Once Jenn earns her Atmos bonus next month, we should be close to our all-time high. It’s a great time to accumulate points, knowing we don’t have a lot of plans this year, but we will need them in 2027, which should be a heavy travel year for us.
Newby to Expert Traveler 