Tag Archives for hilton honors.
1,000 bonus points are worth about $4. And that’s all you earn regardless of how much you spend or how long you stay. It’s not even 1,000 points per night!
Bilt Rewards is back with its Rent Day offers for March 1. The headline here is a Hilton Honors transfer bonus: 150% for general members, and 200% for anyone with Bilt Rewards status. A 200% transfer bonus means 3 Hilton points for every 1 Bilt point transferred.
Hilton Honors quietly raised free award night redemption prices on the last Friday before the holidays. Since they stopped publishing award charts, they did not tell anyone that they did this, but your Honors points are now worth less than they were on Thursday.
Several months ago Hilton became a Bilt Rewards transfer partner and you shouldn’t care (don’t ever transfer Bilt points to Hilton at 1:1), except that this means from time to time they’ll make really cool offers for Bilt’s monthly Rent Day. And that day has come.
Honors points are normally low value, but since the points cost of SLH Hotels is capped at the most expensive pricing for Hilton properties, you can get outstanding value – 3 to 4 cents per point in some cases, as opposed to less than half a cent per point normally. And the hotels are much nicer than most Hilton brand hotels.
2,500 points per stay is better than not 2,500 bonus points but I view that as a weaker offer heading into a weaker travel period.
Each Saturday morning Adrian Waltz pulls new flights added and flights removed from airline schedules and this week he found something really interesting from American Airlines.
Nearly 400 SLH hotels are now online with the Hilton Honors partnership, so that you earn in the Hilton program on paid rates and can redeem your points for stays at their portfolio of luxury hotels. This gives Hilton a huge edge in luxury redemptions – making their points more alluring, even if not super high value.
Hilton has added 3 SLH properties: Hilton says they are releasing only “limited inventory” now with additional space added as the continue testing, in preparation for broader partnership rollout.
Bilt Rewards has added Hilton Honors as a transfer partner. Just like with their addition of Marriott as a transfer partner in the fall, it doesn’t add much to the program. It’s not that Hilton Honors points aren’t valuable, it’s that everything at Hilton is inflated by a factor of three or four – on both the earning and the redemption side – and that balances out fine except when transferring points 1:1. (Bilt requires a 2,000 point minimum transfer for base members, and 1,000 points for elites.) First transfers from Bilt to Hilton through June 8th receive 1,000 bonus Hilton points. That’s worth about $4, and doesn’t make up for 1:1 simply not being a worthwhile transfer ratio to Hilton. Crockfords, Las Vegas Bilt points now transfer to all of the major U.S.-based hotel…
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
