When you don't want to deal with public transportation or the will-they-cancel-or-won't-they game you sometimes have with ride-hailing apps, booking a real, grown-up car service can absolutely be worth it.
Think: when you want a car waiting for you after a long flight, when you've got multiple stops in a city within a few hours, when you're traveling with multiple people or lots of luggage, or when you just want to hit the "easy button" to get from point A to point B.
A car service that I've used several times in the last year for those exact situations is Blacklane.
Blacklane is available not only across many parts of the U.S. but also in cities around the globe. Whether my flight has been late, I've needed to add a stop along the way, or I've set up rides for other members of my family, we've yet to have a single problem while using Blacklane.
There are even a few ways to use Blacklane while leveraging credit card and/or loyalty program credits to bring down your out-of-pocket cost — or at least earn some extra points along the way.
Related: Why I love using Blacklane for airport rides
What is Blacklane?
Blacklane is a car service that uses high-end vehicles staffed by professional chauffeurs in more than 500 cities worldwide.
You can choose whether to book Business Class (Mercedes E-Class or BMW 5 Series, for example), First Class (Mercedes S-Class or BMW 7 Series) or a Business Van (Mercedes V-Class, Chevy Suburban or Cadillac Escalade, as examples).
You can also choose whether to book by the hour or for a single ride, such as an airport transfer or a trip from one city to another.
If you're using Blacklane for an airport pickup, the company will track your flight and adjust your pickup time as needed if it runs early or late. Blacklane will also provide one free hour of waiting time for airport pickups.
Related: Clear and Blacklane to partner on a home-to-gate chauffeur service
How to book Blacklane
You can book Blacklane rides through the Blacklane app or website — or even via the Bilt Travel site. We'll get to why you may want to book Blacklane through Bilt shortly.
Regardless of where you book, if you're using Blacklane for an airport pickup, you can enter your flight information so the company can monitor your flight and adjust your pickup time if delays happen.
On the Blacklane website, you can also enter any discount codes you may have at the time of booking.
And while pricing varies based on when and where you travel, just to give you some context, in my experience across a few U.S. cities, airport transfers that take about 30 to 40 minutes often start in the $100 to $150 range. You can also cancel up to one hour before your ride is scheduled to start without any penalty.
Blacklane also states on its website that gratuities are included in the price of rides, except in New York, where you have the option to tip your chauffeur separately via a link emailed to you after your ride is complete.
How to save on Blacklane
OK, here's the really fun part.
There are a few ways to use Blacklane while leveraging credit card and/or loyalty program credits at the same time in order to bring down your out-of-pocket cost or at least earn some extra points along the way.
Get up to $200 in annual Blacklane credits via Citi Strata Elite
The Citi Strata Elite℠ Card (see rates and fees), which I think is a massively underrated card, comes with two $100 Blacklane statement credits each year, one valid from January through June and another from July through December.
To use those credits, simply use your Strata Elite card to pay for your Blacklane ride(s), and a statement credit of up to $100 will post to your Citi account after that month's statement closes.
Use up to $150 in Bilt Cash on Blacklane + earn Bilt points on any card
If you earn Bilt Cash*, you can now use up to $150 of it per calendar year on Blacklane rides, depending on your Bilt elite status tier.
- Up to $150 annually for Bilt Platinum members
- Up to $100 annually for Bilt Gold members
- Up to $50 annually for Bilt Blue and Silver members
And Bilt Cash is pretty easy to earn: $300 comes as part of the welcome bonus with the Bilt Palladium Card (see rates and fees). New cardholders also earn 50,000 bonus points after spending $4,000 on nonhousing purchases in the first 90 days from account opening. You can earn 4% Bilt Cash with every purchase on all three Bilt credit cards.
In addition, every Blacklane ride booked through Bilt Concierge or Bilt Travel earns 1 Bilt point per dollar — and that's true regardless of which credit card you use to pay. That means you can earn Bilt points on the ride even if you don't use a Bilt credit card to pay, so it definitely makes sense to set up a Bilt rewards account.
*Up to $100 of Bilt Cash earned rolls over to the next year.
Bottom line
I'm a big fan of using Blacklane for certain trips, especially when I want to be sure there aren't any hiccups getting to or from the airport. And that's true now more than ever, since the Citi Strata Elite and Bilt integrations can take a pretty significant chunk out of the cost of several Blacklane rides each year.
If you're already carrying the Strata Elite or earning Bilt Cash, Blacklane is an option worth keeping in mind the next time you want to hit the "easy button" on getting where you need to go.
