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Tom’s post this morning about how he is taking his family to a luxury Hilton for about £10 each, reminded me that although we have covered the fantastic Hilton Points bonuses in detail (my favourite being how to stay for the price of a chocolate bar!), we’ve somehow so far neglected to mention that you can stack triple Avios on top.
Hilton HHonors allows you to ‘Double Dip’ – either by earning ‘Points + Points’ (P+P), or ‘Points + Miles’ (P+M) for your stays.
The additional Points you get for selecting P+P is 50% more base Points per Dollar, so 5 extra Hilton HHonors Points per $1 spent. If you select P+M instead, you forego that extra 5 Hilton Points, and in most cases get 1 airline Mile of your choice per $1 spent instead.
Ordinarily, I would say that 5 Hilton Points are worth considerably more than 1 Avios (or Virgin Flying Club Mile or whatever you prefer), and so would recommend sticking with P+P.
Hilton quite often have bonuses on the number of airline Miles you can earn though, and obviously that can change the equation. For stays until the end of the year, for example, you can currently get triple Avios – so 3 Avios per $1 spent at Hilton hotels. Most readers are likely to value 5 Hilton Points at about 2p and 3 Avios at about 3p, so this is definitely worth considering.
How to get triple Avios
To take advantage, you need to change your earning preference from P+P to P+M – so login to your Hilton account, click on ‘edit preferences’, and then on ‘change earning style’. You then need to select BA as your preferred earning partner, enter your Executive Club number and you must also register for the triple Avios promotion on this page here.
Bottom line
By stacking all the current bonuses that are available right now, with the Avios bonus, a one-night £80 ($100) stay at a Hilton would earn a standard member 8,000 Hilton Points + 300 Avios. A Diamond member would earn 10,000 Hilton Points + 300 Avios.
By my valuations, a Diamond member would be getting back more than half the cost of their stay in Points/Miles – that’s a pretty great rebate!
I am a Hilton member, mostly flying with SAS, but do have a membership at BA, but really dont understand the Avios system and why it is called that.
but if I stay at hilton which I have from time to time and then collect Avios point. how many avios is normal to collect to get a free flight within Europe fo instance.
Hi Lars,
Well, the good news is you’ve found the right place to learn – In fact, we actually have some really good intro to Avios posts going up in the next week or two!
Avios redemptions on BA start from 4,000 Avios Points (+£17.50 taxes) within Europe. You can also use Avios on partners like Finnair, Iberia and Air Berlin within Europe from 4,500 Points, so you don’t need that many to do something useful with them. There are also quite a lot of free/cheap ways to collect more Avios, even if you aren’t UK-based, which we regularly cover on here too.
If you have any questions at all about Avios though, don’t hesitate to ask in the comments or on the forums here – someone will always know the answer and be happy to help.