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Hilton Honors is by some distance my favourite loyalty scheme. For me, it combines the consistent advantages of hotel loyalty schemes (versus airline miles, and their depressing inflexibility and hidden costs) with one of the most “playable” reward schemes out there.
While there are sometimes methods of booking for others, the general rule in the miles and points game is that any transfer of your points to others will carry with it a fee so eye-watering, it strips all value from them.
Not so Hilton Honors. Via the “transfer” option, Hilton Honors permits you to transfer (in increments of 1,000 Points) up to 500,000 Points to other Hilton Honors members per calendar year. That gives those of you with a solid Hilton Honors balance ample scope to generously dish out Hilton stays (which of course start at 5K points) to friends and family without taking a huge financial hit when doing so.
It also allows you to effectively “credit” stays between you and your other half, in such a way that they can earn the status credit on a particular stay, while you pay for it. This is helpful for example if you’re a regular business traveller with status already – you can then transfer your points to your partner, who can book your personal stays and earn his/her way to status too. Or, they can transfer their points to you so you can both receive elite status benefit on your leisure stays too.
An alternative
One alternative to the above, of course, is to simply use your points to book your friends or family into the Hilton in question. I’ve spoken to Hilton Honors a few times about this and they’re seemingly relaxed on the point: the key is to ensure that the person staying is listed as an “additional guest” in the “Guest Information” section, which enables them to check in under their own name:
This option carries the added advantage of the stay being credited to your Honors account. So, for example, you can book your parents in for a stay while yourself benefiting from the night needed to move you towards Elite status.
If you’re new to the scheme and after some free Hilton Honors points, you can get a 2500 point sign up bonus here.
Shortly confused because if the wording.
Do to mean that if I transfer points from my wife’s account to mine, it will contribute towards status points? Or just redemptions?
Slightly*
No. It just means that you can move the points to whoever has status. The reward stay then counts for the status member (1 stay / X nights), rather than being “wasted” on the family member who doesn’t care about status.
I think you are exaggerating by quite a considerable extent. Unless you are constantly redeeming and putting cash revenue stays in Poland, and with the exception of the ‘Oman’ hotel for 5k points – which is a world apart from its photos – or Egypt or Turkey – the Hilton scheme has been massively degraded in the past 24 months. Which is why they’re handing out diamond status left, right and centre. Do you actually stay in the hotels you write about? On another note Poland is very good if you have diamond status. All three Doubletrees have lounges close to Prague Hiltons’ standard. Wroclaw is typically 20k, Kraków 15k, and Warsaw 12k.