Tag Archives for hilton honors.
In January 2020 Hilton moved from requiring activity in an account every 12 months to keep it active to a 15 month expiration policy. Then the pandemic hit and many programs, including Hilton, paused points expiration. Hilton points won’t expire until at least December 31, 2022. Now they’ve moved to a ‘permanent’ 24 month expiration policy, with points first expiring again in a year. Why the change?
There are two elements to loyalty marketing: recognition and reward. The former is the elite program, how you treat your best customers. The latter is rebate for their spend.
We can make some overall claims about best that will not apply to every member, every time, with their own subjective preferences. We can do this by looking at the overall earn-and-burn program, and by comparing the major elite benefits each program offers.
Hilton Honors is straight up extending elite status again. They’re also rolling all elite nights earned in 2021 over to qualifying for status in 2022 (for the 2023 elite year) as well as reducing elite qualification requirements in 2022. They’re also extending the pause on points expiration.
For September 7 through December 31, 2021 they’re running PowerUp which is double points for all members on all stays, and triple points for co-brand credit card members.
Right now, for some reason, award nights at the Conrad Bora Bora are wide open through March 2022. Book for 89,000 Hilton points per night (a great value), and they’re fully cancellable. If you have Hilton points there’s no reason not to book a trip.
Hilton Honors was a weak loyalty program to begin with. It was less rewarding for your spend than you realized in terms of free nights earned – it offers lower rebates for both general members and for top elites than the other major chains (I show my work) – and more modest elite benefits than Hyatt and even the consistently inconsistent Marriott.
However what Hilton had going for it is breakfast. That was offered at all brands, without exceptions, and offered even to Golds. Gold is more or less a giveaway level, available via many credit cards and historically bundled via a number of promotions.
Hilton has dropped 11 partners including Alaska, Avianca LifeMiles, and Amtrak with zero notice. Shameful.
The Hilo, Hawaii DoubleTree ownership says on video they went ahead and rented out all rooms at the property under an event contract instead, of honoring bookings, redemption or paid, calling it a “windfall.”
Hilton responded letting me know that the hotel “is an independently owned and operated property” so they “cannot speak on the hotel’s behalf.”
Hilton actually is actually introducing an on property food and beverage credit for elites, to replace their breakfast benefit, for early July, 2021 through the end of the year.
This applies at full-service, lifestyle, and Hilton Garden Inn properties in the U.S. only.
At the beginning of the month I reported that Hilton had raised the top price of an award night to 150,000 points and that this applies only to the Waldorf Astoria in the Maldives. Some redemption nights there are 120,000 points, however.
When this was discovered there were no redemption nights available at all. Even with the higher pricing it wasn’t possible to spend Hilton points for a standard room, and could only use ‘points as money’ to book rooms based on the prevailing room rate (which can cost over a million points per night). All of a sudden that’s changed so act fast.
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 »
