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The InsideFlyer team has long been very strong advocates of cashback sites. Earning cashback on travel spend you would have made anyway is as near to “free cash” as you’re going to get without mugging grannies, and if you throw in our TopCashback sign-up bonus of 1250 free Avios, now is a really good time to start (collecting cashback, not mugging grannies. We strongly advise against that, for the record – those walking sticks can hurt).

One major drawback, however, of cashback on your travel spend (which is obviously the focus of this site) is that you cannot earn Hilton cashback with UK cashback sites TopCashback.co.uk or Quidco.com. The withdrawal of Hilton cashback was quite a blow for many, as generous rebates were offered – sometimes as much as 20%.

There is, however, still a viable cashback option for Hilton… 

While TopCashback.co.uk no longer offers Hilton cashback, its sister US-focused site TopCashback.com does. You will earn cashback in dollars, but you can withdraw to any Paypal account where the money will be converted.

The only “hack” required to use the US cashback site is that when you sign up, you’ll need to use a different email address to the one you use for the UK site.

You can see in my own account history an example of a payment made:

What cashback is currently available?

The first point to note here is that, of course, any cashback is better than no cashback.

Having said that, please take a deep breath, as the Hilton cashback on TopCashback.com is very oddly structured, as follows:

So, as you can see, you basically get penalised for your loyalty. The likelihood here is that Hilton has a nominal acquisition cost for people relative to their HHonors status (or lack of it), and as Diamond members are likely to keep coming back, they have a much lower acquisition cost and therefore get less cashback*.

While that probably works on an accountant’s spreadsheet somewhere, it looks pretty ridiculous in practice.

However, this really is your only cashback option for Hilton, and as 4/2/1% is better than 0%, you just need to accept that. You could of course get higher cashback by booking without registering your status (e.g. not logging in, or booking in your partner’s name if they have no/lower status): in these circumstances, clearly you need to balance the cashback against the loss of status benefits.

Anything else?

Yes. Note that for completeness, you can also currently earn miles for Hilton bookings via the Avios eStore (currently 8 Avios per £1 spent) and Virgin Atlantic’s Shops Away (currently 6 Avios per £1 spent). Obviously this isn’t cashback as such, but I’d certainly value 8 Avios/6 Virgin Flying Club miles higher than 4, 2 or 1 pence.

*If you think I sound clever here, which I know I do, I have to entirely concede that this was Joe’s theory when I spoke to him about this last night.