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When Hilton HHonors became Hilton Honors earlier this year – which I wrote about here and here – the old award chart disappeared along with the old Points + Money scheme, which looked like this:

In its place, we received a fancy new slider. Hilton Honors members could then choose to pay with a combination of points and money.

If we wanted to find out how much an award night was supposed to cost (instead of just paying what we were told), we now needed to refer to this website:

Note the slippery wording…

While hotels will no longer be in reward categories, the price of a Standard Room Reward will not exceed the current maximum amount of Points per night listed for each hotel

“Current” is certainly quite different from the rates prevalent at the time of the changeover. And, of course, Hilton Honors has removed the old webpage that detailed which hotels were assigned to which categories. So we can never really quite know for sure what is changing, unless we have excellent memories or a blog has published an exhaustive resource. Many bloggers will occasionally double-check that their favourite Category 1 hotels still cost 5,000 points per night and that standard rooms at the Conrad Maldives still cost no more than 95,000 points per night. Based on those limited data points one might assume that no devaluation is secretly taking place.

This isn’t to say that any hotel chain isn’t completely within its rights to change the number of points charged for an award night, simply that transparency and honesty are a key element to building and retaining loyalty. Nobody wants to save up their points for an award, then wake up to find that the price has changed overnight without warning.

So, I was somewhat bemused when I was searching for an Honors hotel near Las Vegas airport. The Hampton used to be a Category 3 hotel costing no more than 20,000 points per night. (although you’ll have to trust me on that since I can’t find any resource to confirm) Yet now… a standard room costs 25,000 points per night.

Since there has never been an award category costing 25,000 points per night – even the old category 4 was either 20K or 30K per night – I can only surmise that the award price caps are now stealthily fading away.

Perhaps this is just one rare case, or perhaps more such examples will be exposed over time. But it’s no longer safe to assume that Hilton Honors intends to keep the old award pricing indefinitely…