Hilton Honors offers free 90 days of status to anyone with current elite status in a major hotel program that has stayed at a hotel at least once in the last 24 months. Then, if you stay with them you can keep or upgrade the status – valid for nearly two full years at this point.
The offer has been available for some time but it’s just been changed, increasing the requirements to keep status slightly.
- Receive Gold status for 90 days
- Stay 8 nights during that period, keep Gold through March 2025 (increased from 7 nights)
- Stay 14 nights during that period, receive Diamond through March 2025 (increased from 12 nights)
This offer is available to current elite members of the following programs (and under the terms they won’t matter to ‘other’):
In order to enroll in the match offer you must be a current member of the program and cannot already have Gold or Diamond status. You can only take advantage of this offer once. It takes them a shocking ‘7 – 12 business days’ to process status upgrades, and reward stays won’t count towards the 8 or 14 nights to keep status, even though reward stays count towards regular status-earning.
You want to be a Hilton program member for free wifi. You want to be at least a Silver for 5th night free on award redemptions. And Golds avoid the worst rooms in the hotel (‘space-available room upgrades’) and receive breakfast or a food and beverage credit depending on where the hotel is located.
Hilton Honors does not even guarantee late check-out. If the hotel has a lounge, Diamond is better for access to that, but so many hotels haven’t re-opened their lounges. At most U.S. properties Diamond upgrades aren’t materially better than those offered to Gold. If you travel in Asia you’ll do better of course.
With the elimination of actual free breakfast as a benefit for U.S. properties, replaced by a food and beverage credit that doesn’t usually cover the cost of breakfast (but can be used for other things – they should have given an either/or choice like my dorm dining plan in college), I view Honors as the weakest major hotel loyalty program. Even the rewards for spending at their hotels are weakest.
Still, it’s always better to have status than not to have status. I have Gold from Amex Platinum, and the easiest path to Diamond is the premium co-brand Hilton Amex that bundles it. A year before the upgrade they were testing confirmed suite upgrades as a benefit that four years later that still hasn’t gone anywhere. Years before that they were contemplating a higher elite tier with better benefits (since their top tier is available via credit card with no spending requirement even) but that too stalled.
(HT: Loyalty Lobby)
Uh oh, Gary’s gonna need new stock photos for Hilton exteriors and lobby coffee bars now that the Hilton JFK is shutting down!
LOL. That recycled photo of a ‘dated’ Hilton hotel is emblematic of how out of touch and anachronistic is pretty everything that is published on this site about Hilton Honors, a program that the host despises with a passion but that keeps getting stronger the more he predicts its demise or expounds on its purported shortcomings, unnecessarily in my view because he does not even stay any of the chains hotels…
Yeah, Gary, when was the last time you stay at a Hilton hotel? Last century? I thought so. So why should anyone take seriously your thoroughly debunked but mindlessly recycled claims, including linking to a widely panned post that claims that “Even the rewards for spending at their hotels are weakest“, when the industry-leading AMEX Aspire alone earns 14 points/$, which is equivalent to earning 4.7 Hyatt points/$, i.e., almost the number of base points that a Globalist earns/$ on spending at Hyatt hotels? See? And I did not even need to use hard math, which I can, to prove the claim wrong!
It really must be a slow travel news day, or he got irked with a comment I posted at OMAAT that utterly destroyed the demonstrably bogus claim that World of Hyatt arguably has the most generous elite breakfast benefit of any major hotel loyalty program.
@DCS – “Yeah, Gary, when was the last time you stay at a Hilton hotel? Last century? I thought so.”
No, my account remains active via STAYS [I don’t credit other activity there due to low value of Hilton points]
I guess I should clarify, just in case – I was just having a bit of fun. I’ve been reading Gary’s blog for long enough that I recognize almost all of his favorite stock photos, lol.
LOL. The question was specific: “when was the last time you stayed at a Hilton r property” . The answer, quite tellingly, is evasive.
Then there is the kicker: can you explain to your readers how a Hilton point has a lower “value” than any other points currency? It’s not a trick question, but that you made the comment at all means that you still “don’t get it”, despite having written daily on the subject for what, more two decades?
@CW — No need to clarify. My point stands on its own merit.
When registering for the match, they only show Platinum, Spire, and Gold for “IHG Rewards Club.” The program is now IHG One Rewards, Spire is gone from the program, and the elite levels are now Diamond, Platinum, Gold, Silver. Maybe they should have done a bit more research on their competition before rolling out this promotion?
Oh no! I didn’t know that the Hilton JFK was closing…it was my go-to JFK hotel, at least prior to Covid. Yes it was dated but the Exec lounge was friendly and treated us better than most Hilton lounges in the US.