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Award charts are important! Without them, travel companies are free to devalue their loyalty programmes without the vast majority of members becoming aware of it. It is left to crowd-sourced forums such as Flyertalk to notice the changes and publicise them – if not widely, at least to miles and points enthusiasts.
Points inflation is an unavoidable aspect of this hobby, but when companies choose secrecy over transparency, or when they make changes overnight with no advance warning… then it becomes more difficult to place any kind of trust in that company. And trust is important if you are spending money to accumulate a “points currency” whose value is controlled by a single company.
When Hilton Honors got rid of award charts in 2017, I suspected that this wouldn’t be positive in the long run. And most of what I’ve seen since then confirms my suspicions. Earlier this year, Joe wrote an interesting, if outrageous, post about “staying for free” through a series of one-night stays at select Hilton hotels. No longer…
Our favourite Hilton, the one in Salalah, Oman, now costs 10,000 points per night.
The Hampton in Krakow, Poland? Same story…
Egypt is also more expensive.
But Does It Really Matter?
You might think that it doesn’t really matter. Some of the hotels I mention have long been obvious sweet spots and, quite frankly, 10,000 points per night is still a bargain, especially with the fifth night free on longer award stays.
But trust matters. And we’ve already lost all visibility regarding appropriate pricing for mid-range hotels, those former Category 4-8 hotels that could be priced between 30,000 and 80,000 points per night. So the only way to notice sneaky devaluations is to concentrate on the old Categories 1-3 and 9.
And what about those top-end hotels? The ones costing 95,000 points per night, such as the Conrad Maldives. The cap still appears to be holding, but do you really want to painstakingly accumulate 380,000 points (or 760,000) for a five or ten night stay, when tomorrow Hilton Honors could decide that you now need 500,000? I didn’t think so…
Shame on Hilton Honors!
Have you found any other Honors hotels whose floor price has so obviously increased?
Good article Craig, how many HH points was Hilton Oman before per night?
Good point. Forgot to mention that they were all 5K per night until recently.
Really?
Is it sooo difficult to guess from the first time what they were before when they are now 10K?
C’mon
The thing is that on churn hotels like Hamptons, the rooms are cheap, and not all that often do they have a completely full to the seams hotel….
The bigger resorts/expensive locations, etc, they dont particularly want redemptions – they LIKE THE IDEA that redemtions can be made to advertise the fact that you can stay effectively for free in say the Conrad Maldives but they in no way really want folks actually doing it…..
HIlton have been fantastic up until now; however, they seem to be having a bit of a change in direction since the refresh of (H)Honors! They need to start being careful at not miffing their base customers off….(already, the Hilton Barclaycard has been removed from new applicants here in the UK – who knows whats going to happen next – but it seems, it will be secretive…..!).
Hopefully we will have access to the global Hilton Amex alliance in the Uk with credit cards such as the Aspire.
I have 50k points and the Oman one was a hotel where I was looking to get at least a decent week out of my points. Can anyone recommend any other decent hotels that are still in the 5k points bracket? This type of behaviour erodes any confidence in the brand and I’d rather burn the points before they get devalued further.
There’s a decent HGI in Bali for 5K, but that’s near the airport. Convenient for early/late flights, but probably not for a week.
The Doubletree in Kuala Lumpur is also outstanding value, but at 10K. Krakow is good value in peak season, even at 10K.
I think some of the Sharm el Sheikh options are still at 5K.
But it’s definitely slim picking in the 5-10K range.
THe new DT in Melakka also went up to 10000, therefore the Hampton Gdansk Oliva went down to 10000. Others I planned on using, e.g. DT Bratislava, Penang, KL remain unchanged
Unfortunately , the one in Swinemünde in Poland also went up from 10 to 15k
In Malaysia – new DT Melaka from 5to 10k
Hilton Kota Kinabalu from 10 to 20k
Hi Craig
of topic a little – but do you know of any fast track schemes to get to Hilton Gold that are available currently?
I have seen some Visa ones…but you need to live outside of Europe
Any recommendations?
Unfortunately no. The one I used last year no longer seems to be in operation.
Whenever we find one, I’m sure we’ll run a post on it! 🙂
Hilton Foshan (China) – increased from 5,000 to 10,000