Hilton News and Offers Round-up

There’s been a lot of news and a number of deals related to Hilton in the past week, so here’s a rundown of some of the offers and news. 

Rebranding to Hilton Honors

Hilton decided to rebrand its loyalty program formerly known as Hilton HHonors, and now just Hilton Honors. This rebranding came with significant changes to the program including eliminating an award chart, points pooling, a new points slider, and a few other key features. Some of the changes are positive while others have the potential to be quite negative depending on how things play out. Read more about the changes here. 

Status Match 

Hilton is offering status matches again! We utilized this last year to match Brad’s IHG platinum status and earn Hilton Diamond status. It only took us applying for one card and staying one night to do so, too! 

If you already have been matched you can extend your status the following ways: 

You’ll also have the opportunity to extend your status match through March 31, 2019,
when you stay with us over the next 90 days. If you’re matched to Gold status,
you’ll just need to complete 4 stays. If you’re matched to Diamond, you’ll need 8 stays

So we’d just need 8 stays (not nights) to get Brad to retain his Diamond status. However, we’re probably going to wait until next year to act on this since we have Diamond status until March of 2018. While Diamond status doesn’t offer you overwhelmingly valuable benefits, there are some nice perks which you can read more about here. 

2K everyday

Hilton is offering the following promotion: 

Earn 2,000 Points every day at over 4,800 hotels when you sign up and complete a stay from February 1 through April 30, 2017.

So with each stay you can net an extra 2,000 Honors points. Not bad and it’s super easy to sign-up.

Amex Offer: earn Membership Rewards 

Right now, you can earn 3,500 Membership Rewards when you spend $250 or more at Hilton Hotels and Resorts and Curio collections. The offer expires April 15, 2017. Unfortunately, this is a targeted offer. 

There’s also another offer for Hilton gift cards that might be targeted where you can get a one-time $5 statement credit by spending a minimum of $75+ in one or more transactions online at americanexpress.com/hiltongiftcard. The offer expires April 30, 2017.

Final word 

Although Hilton points are one of the weakest reward currencies, I find them extremely easy to accumulate with the generous bonus earning rates from stays and from credit cards like the Citi Reserve and Amex Surpass. For example, as Diamond members, we earn the following rates for every dollar spent on Hilton properties:

• 10 base points
• 5 points for opting for “points and points”
• 5 points for being a Diamond member

And since we cover our stays with the Amex Honors Surpass, we earn 12 more points per dollar spent! So that’s a total of 32 Hilton Honors points we earn every time we stay at a Hilton. At an estimated value of .4 cents per point, that’s like getting 13% back for every dollar spent at Hilton properties. Moreover, it seems like there are always Hilton Honors promotions going on that allow you to earn a ton of additional Honors points if your timing is right.