From January 1 through April 30 Hilton offered double points with no properties excluded. Hilton co-brand American Express cardholders got an additional bonus of 1000 HHonors points when paying for their first stay with the card during the promotion period.

For May 1 through August 31 they again offered double points, this time called “Unlimited Bonus.”

Conrad Bangkok

And now for September 1 through December 31 they will again be offering double points and will again be calling it Unlimited Bonus. This time there will be an add-on bonus for mobile bookings.

• Hilton HHonors will have offered double points as their bonus for the entire year, with minor add-on tweaks.

• There is no truth to the rumor that all of the creative marketing people have been let go in McLean, Virginia and replaced with a “copy / paste function.”

It’s a promotion and you’re better off earning double points than single points. What double points means is an extra 10 points per dollar spent, worth about 4 cents (Hilton HHonors points are worth about $0.004 each), so an extra 4% rebate.

Waldorf Hilton London

Hilton used to exclude many of its properties from promotions, they’ve overcome that which is a big win. And hotels are still generally full, with high average daily room rates, so there aren’t that many empty hotels to try to fill with promotions. I do give them credit for not having gaps between promotions.

Hotel programs are offering promotions largely because other hotel programs are. They aren’t revolutionary, but they add value and activate members and help prevent other programs from poaching stays.

People who registered for the last bonus will be emailed telling them to register again for this one. If you didn’t, there will be a landing page, but it isn’t up yet.

I do sort of think that since the promotion is the same (double points) and the name is the same (Unlimited Bonus) that it’s really like extending the last promotion through the end of the year rather than offering a new promotion so they shouldn’t require re-registration — though of course they only want to spend incremental marketing dollars on members aware of the promotion and potentially influenced by it, rather than awarding points to people who weren’t even expecting it.

Update: While I was told that Hilton’s “double points promo continues” and that they would “keep the double points going” in fact they are going to change the promotion name from Unlimited Bonus to Double Up!