As one of the largest hospitality companies in the world, Hilton spans 119 countries with more than 6,400 properties. Its 18 brands cover travelers from casual and contemporary to resorts and luxury. With over 100 years of history, Hilton carries global recognition and with that, has a generous loyalty program known as Hilton Honors. With multiple ways to earn and redeem points, we will take an in-depth look into their program to see if this program is a good fit for your travel and hospitality needs.
History
Hilton Hotels & Resorts, formerly known as Hilton Hotels, was founded in 1919 by Conrad Hilton. His first property, the Mobley Hotel, was located in Cisco, Texas and almost never came to be. Prior to purchasing the hotel, Hilton was originally going to pursue purchasing a bank. You could argue he ultimately made the right choice as Hilton has since flourished into a staple in the hospitality industry.
While the Mobley Hotel was the first Hilton property, the first Hilton-branded hotel was the Dallas Hilton, which opened in six years later in 1925. As growth continues to this day, the Hilton brand seeks to cover a variety of housing options, ranging from luxurious full service hotels to extended stay suites. From that original hotel purchase in 1919, Hilton’s expansion has been vast, spanning six continents and over 6,000+ properties.
Its loyalty program, Hilton Honors, started in 1987 as a scratch-off promotion tied to the U.S. Olympic Team. Since its creation, Hilton has evolved and created multiple ways to earn and spend reward points. Notably, American Express and Hilton HHoners introduced their first co-branded credit card, which allowed cardholders to earn Hilton HHonors points on everyday purchases. This bucked the trend of only being able to earn points via stays and helped shape the hotel credit card partnerships for years to come.
Hilton Brands
Hilton covers the full gambit of travel needs for its customers. Its brands include:
Hilton Member and Elite Benefits
The Hilton Honors program is easy and free to join on its website, Hilton.com. As a base member of Hilton Honors, you are granted benefits which include:
- Guaranteed Hilton Honors Discount rate on paid stays
- Points-earning ability which can be used toward free nights, travel partners and more
- No resort fees on reward stays
- Digital check-in
- Choose your room (as available at check-in)
- Digital Key with your smart device
- Free WiFi, where applicable
- Access to exclusive Hilton Honors Experiences
Hilton Honors also has three additional tiers offering additional perks and benefits. These higher tiers are achieved reasonably with nights stayed at Hilton properties. Along with the above-mentioned benefits, higher tier members can achieve:
You can earn status with Hilton in multiple ways. Silver tier can be earned with 5 nights, 2 stays or 12,500 base points earned in a calendar year. Gold tier can be entered with 20 nights, 10 stays or 37,500 base points earned. Finally, Diamond tier can be earned with 30 nights, 15 stays or 60,000 base points earned.
Status Match
Picking up one of Hilton’s credit card options is the easiest and fastest way to obtain status. If you have status with another hotel brand, leveraging Hilton’s status match program is an option of obtaining status. Hilton doesn’t explicitly state which competing hotel status qualifies, so it is ultimately trial and error.
Currently, upon sending the required documentation of status with another hotel loyalty program, you’re matched to Hilton Gold. You can keep your Gold status by staying 5 nights within your 90 day trial period with the ability to get upgraded to Diamond by staying 9 nights in the same time frame. Under the current status match promotion, status will be maintained through March 31, 2023.
Earning Hilton Honors Points
To earn Hilton points, having a Hilton Honors account is required. There are varying ways to earn points, and we’ll touch on the primary ways to earn.
Hilton Honors American Express Card
Up to 7X Reward Rate
Earn 7X Hilton Honors Bonus Points on eligible purchases made directly with a hotel or resort within the Hilton Portfolio;Read More
Welcome Bonus
Earn 80,000 Points + 50,000 Points
Annual Fee
$0
Regular APR
15.74%-24.74% Variable
Credit Score
Excellent/Good (700 - 749)
A good intro into the Hilton world without paying an annual fee, the Hilton Honors Card from American Express brings you a few nice perks. But if you're a serious Hilton traveler, you'll want to look at one of the higher end cobranded Hilton cards offered by American Express.
- High point earning rates
- Automatic Silver status includes complimentary late checkout
- No foreign transaction fee
- No blackout dates
- Low point redemption value
- Silver status comes with limited benefits
- Poor transfer rate to airline partners
- Earn 80,000 Hilton Honors Bonus Points after you spend $1,000 in purchases on the Hilton Honors American Express Card in the first 3 months of Card Membership.
- Plus, you can earn an additional 50,000 Hilton Honors Bonus Points after you spend a total of $5,000 in purchases on the Card in the first 6 months.
- Earn 7X Hilton Honors Bonus Points for each dollar of eligible purchases charged directly with a hotel or resort within the Hilton portfolio.
- Earn 5X Hilton Honors Bonus Points for each dollar of eligible purchases at U.S. restaurants, at U.S. supermarkets, and at U.S. gas stations.
- Earn 3X Hilton Honors Bonus Points for all other eligible purchases on your Card.
- No Foreign Transaction Fees. Enjoy international travel without additional fees on purchases made abroad.
- Enjoy complimentary Hilton Honors Silver status with your Card. Plus, spend $20,000 on eligible purchases on your Card in a calendar year and you can earn an upgrade to Hilton Honors Gold status through the end of the next calendar year.
- No Annual Fee.
- Terms Apply.
- See Rates & Fees
Hotel Stays
The most traditional way to earn hotel points is to stay with Hilton when you travel. You can earn 10 Hilton points per dollar spent with the Hilton portfolio on your room rate and other eligible charges, such as telephone calls and room service. There are a couple of exceptions: At Hampton Inn and Homewood Suites by Hilton, you only earn on the room rate. At Home2 Suites by Hilton and Tru by Hilton, you earn 5 base points per dollar on the room rate.
Having status will also grant you bonus points on your stay. Silver members earn a 20% bonus while Gold and Diamond members earn 80% and 100% bonus points respectively. Some stays do not earn points including third party rates, reward stays or some other group rate package. In short, if you book on Hilton.com, by calling Hilton or on their mobile app, rest assured that your booking qualifies.
In addition to status bonus multipliers, Hilton often offers limited-time promotions where staying a designated number of nights can yield additional points. These promotions often require registration before any nights are counted, so be aware.
Credit Card Spending
An easy way to earn Hilton points is to use one of its co-branded credit card options. American Express issues its four Hilton options for earning points, three personal and one business.
Partners
Beyond staying directly at a Hilton property or having their credit card, leveraging their travel partnerships can be used to obtain additional Hilton points. For example, linking your Hilton Honors account to Lyft can net 2 or 3 points per dollar depending on ride type. Or if ride-sharing isn’t for you, qualifying car rentals with Alamo, Enterprise and National could earn bonus Hilton points.
Hilton also has a transfer partnership with Amtrak, Hawaiian Airlines and Virgin Atlantic meaning you can convert those points and miles into Hilton points. It would require calling the program from which you’re transferring points/miles to initiate these requests. In general, these are not great point values and only make sense to top off your account for an award.
- 5,000 Amtrak Guest Reward points can transfer into 10,000 Hilton points
- 10,000 HawaiianMiles can transfer into 15,000 Hilton points
- 10,000 Virgin points can transfer into 15,000 Hilton points
Points Transfer
American Express Membership Rewards partners with Hilton Honors. This means that if you have an American Express credit card that allows the transfer of points, you can exchange your Membership Reward points for Hilton points at a 1:2 ratio.
While American Express will offer transfer bonuses periodically, it’s generally not a good choice to transfer your more flexible Membership Reward points for Hilton Honors unless you have an immediate, specific and valuable use for your points.
Hilton Honors Dining
Hilton Honors Dining is the opportunity to earn additional points when eating at select dining partners. It is completely free to join and it is as easy as signing up, linking a debit or credit card and using that card at participating dining partners.
For earning rates, Basic members earn 2 Hilton Honors bonus points per dollar spent if you opt out of email communications from Hilton Honors Dining. Opting in automatically bumps you to Select member status, earning 5 points per dollar spent. Having 11 qualified transactions (and opting into email communication) bump you to VIP status, earning 8 points per dollar.
Buying Hilton Points Directly
Hilton sells points at a rate of 1 cent per point with an annual cap of 80,000 Hilton points for $800 (minimum 1,000 points for $10). There are times throughout the year where a promotion where be available where upwards of a 100% bonus may be available. This means for the same $800 you can net 160,000 Hilton points.
Redeeming Hilton Honors Points
The most rewarding part of earning miles and points is the ability to redeem them for dream trips. Hilton’s points are not regarded as carrying a high per point “value”, but with a multitude of ways of accumulating points, being able to get a good return is not uncommon. Beyond free hotel nights, Hilton points can be used towards other travel costs, such as car rentals, experiences and even Amazon.com purchases. We’ll touch on many and determine if they’re a good use of your points.
Award Nights
Before diving into how to book award stays, it’s important to have a base understanding of what a good “value” is for each point. This may be referred to as ‘cpp’, or cents per point. In other words, cpp is the cost of the hotel divided by the number of award points needed to book that hotel. For example, if a room costs $150 per night or 30,000 Hilton points, we would calculate:
- $150 / 30,000 = $0.005 cpp.
This is placing a value of your points used as 1 point = $0.005, or half a penny each. Generally speaking, the higher the cpp, the better. Obtaining a cpp of at least $0.005 for each Hilton point would be ideal, though not always feasible. At the end of the day, your personal valuation of your points is up to you. With that said, let’s book an award night.
The most common and oftentimes most valuable use of your points will be redeeming them for free nights. While Hilton doesn’t publish an award chart, it does offer a Points Explorer tool. On this tool’s web interface, use the slider to designate a maximum number of points you’d like to use per night where you’d like to book.
From there, you can check availability. This tool is especially useful if you don’t know your specific dates and would like to get a general idea of how far your points can get you.
If you are more set on the property but have flexible dates, you can search individual hotels by flexible dates using the monthly calendar. If you’re fixed on your dates but not the property, you can opt to search in the top search bar at hilton.com and select “Use Points” under the Special Rate tab.
After deciding on a property, select it and you’ll be on their landing page to see available rooms and their associated cost. In this example, we see the ability to book a Superior Two Queen Room with Terrace for either $674 per night ($816 after taxes and fees) or 95,000 points per night. This is a pretty good value to use your points on given a ($816 / 95,000 =) 0.008 cpp.
You do have the option of using a mix of cash and points if you don’t have enough points or simply want to save some of your points after selecting ‘Book’ under Standard Room Reward. As you can see in the example above, Hilton allows you to also book premium rewards using Hilton Honors points. These rates are generally terrible values. In the example above, the premium room with a view charges so many Hilton points that the value is less than .002 ccp on the net rate.
It’s important to note that while you get free parking and no resort fees on award stays, you’re on the hook for them if you use cash + points.
5th Night Free
As a bonus, Hilton offers a 5th night free on award stays if you have Silver status or higher. Booking four nights on points costs the same as booking five nights on points and can extend on stays of up to 20 days. That would push our previous booking valuation up, from $0.008 cpp to $0.011 cpp.
Travel Rewards
Hilton has over 30 travel partners including Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and Virgin Atlantic that allow you to exchange your Hilton points for their respective miles. In most cases, this is not a good use of your Hilton points due to the exchange rate. For example, 10,000 Hilton points would transfer to 1,000 Delta SkyMiles. We estimate that 10,000 Hilton points are worth $50 while the 1,000 Delta Skymiles would only be worth around $12. Unless you have a very specific use for the Delta Skymiles, transferring is a bad idea.
Transfers can be initiated online. You will need to add your frequent flyer information on Hilton to complete the transfer.
Experiences
Hilton Experiences offers unique opportunities to use your points in fixed-rate redemptions and bidding options. Experiences include events such as Michelin Star tastings, spa and massage, sporting events and concert tickets. They are truly global experiences with activities in Europe, Asia and Australia. Most experiences will require you to secure your own travel to the location, but it is explicitly noted on each experience’s landing page what you’re responsible for.
Amazon
Linking your Hilton Honors account to Amazon will enable you the ability to use your points to cover your Amazon purchases. At checkout, you will be informed how many points would be needed to cover the purchase and you can opt to partially or fully cover the purchase.
While it is nice to have this added flexibility of using points beyond travel, this option should be avoided if possible. The value given to your Hilton points comes in at about $0.002 cpp, which doesn’t make this an ideal use of points where you can extract many times this value redeeming at hotels.
Family Pooling
Hilton has a feature unique among hotel programs: the ability to pool your points with up to ten friends and family members in order to save up for a giant redemption. This is especially useful if you and your “player 2” each get a new card’s welcome bonus.
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Bottom Line
Hilton carries a strong global recognition with a multitude of brands under its umbrella to give its guests options. With the ability to quickly obtain status, it is easy to get added perks and benefits to your hotel stays whether it’s an overnight stay or week-long vacation. It also carries a very supportive credit card program for accelerating points accumulation. These features combine to make Hilton Honors a powerhouse among hotel points programs.
To view rates and fees for The Hilton Honors American Express Business Card please visit this page.
To view rates and fees for Hilton Honors American Express Card please visit this page.
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