Last week Starwood announced their double and triple points promotion for May through July. (If you’re new to Starwood, sign up with free instant status.)
Hilton is now out with their competing promo, Double Your HHonors.
Hilton’s current promotion runs through April 30th. Like Starwood’s their new promotion runs May 1 through July 31.
You have to choose between earning double points or double miles.
And then you’ll want to have your ‘earning preference’ set accordingly.
Of course, since Hilton killed points and fixed miles as an option, you are now either earning the standard 10 base points plus 5 points per dollar or the 10 base points and 1 mile per dollar.
Under this promotion you can either earn a bonus equal to your base points earned (an extra 10 points per dollar) or double miles (an extra 1 mile per dollar). Even post HHonorsmaggedon, 10 Hilton points are worth more than one airline mile. So the strong choice for most members will be double points.
Still, choices are good.
There’s a big list of non-participating hotels — more than 600 with ~ 95% of those in the United States. So check that list to see if the properties you’ll be staying at will earn the bonus or not.
U.S. hotels have been doing well, and clearly would have to be spending money on this promotion, so it’s not surprising that many have chosen not to do so. But a big list like this is an embarrassment, I think.
No one should choose Hilton because of this bonus but if you’re going to stay at Hilton you should register.
You can only make your selection of double points or miles once, so if you’re not sure what you want I suppose it’s better to wait. But I’ll be registering now. And I’ll be choosing double points.
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Are we still upset about the hhonors deval? I know nobody likes to see anything get worse but…10 base points + 5 bonus points + 3.75 gold bonus points (w/reserve card) + 10 reserve card points + 10 quarterly promo bonus = 37.5 points/dollar spend. 95,000 point Conrad Koh Samui takes $2500 spend. Value $600 minimum; value is 24% of spend. 10 nights in any standard business Hilton and you have that. Is that really that bad in objective terms?
@CW Redemptions at Conrad Koh Samui are still above average value for HHonors and not how most points most of the time will be used. If you use similar valuations across chains Hilton requires ~ 50% more spend than the median program for the average member. Hilton is the cheapest for redemptions at lowest end properties however.
Gary – I agree that the lowest-value redemptions are right smack in the middle (your Portland example). But most people complained about the high-end ones (taking away aspirational redemptions).
Personally, as you say, I’ve found tons of value at the low end since the deval (multiple trips of 5 nights at decent international properties for 80k points per trip).
@CW my point is that you can’t value an HHonors point based on the best possible value you can get from that point, since you can’t readily liquidate points that way. In fairness, the HHonors devaluation probably makes us realize (and I had posted on this) how good a redemption value the program was before..