Hilton HHonors - Why is claiming an international award so complicated?

My husband called Hilton Honors to try to redeem a GLON award in Amsterdam. He was told that no award rooms were available. I knew from this board that calling the hotel directly often works.

My husband called the Reservations Mgr in Amsterdam. She was extremely nice and said that yes, she had award rooms available, no problem. She told us, however, that we needed to book through the U.S. To make a long story short, it took my husband an additional 4 calls to Amsterdam, one to Hilton Honors in the UK (on Amsterdam's advice) and a slew of calls to Hilton Honors in the U.S. to get this room. The U.S. Hilton Honors desk was not helpful even when the Reserv Mgr from Amsterdam called them herself. My husband just got a call at work from Hilton Honors in Scotland, and they supposedly have taken care of things. (Very nice of them but it is a bit odd.) We are still worried about getting the actual paperwork needed, but at least we now have a confirmation number.

I originally had assumed that once the Reserv Mgr gave the okay, we would just have to give the reservation number to Hilton and they would send our paperwork. That is obviously not what happened. What else could we have done to help this process go more smoothly?

Well, at least you got your award stay. The hotel is very nice, has an awesome lounge on the top floor, but is a bit out of the city center.

Hope you have fun.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. I had no problem booking a 7 night stay in London last Spring. Just called the 800 HHonors number and they were very helpful. Even built me a deal to save me 20,000 points.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by mareh:
We are still worried about getting the actual paperwork needed, but at least we now have a confirmation number.

I originally had assumed that once the Reserv Mgr gave the okay, we would just have to give the reservation number to Hilton and they would send our paperwork. That is obviously not what happened. What else could we have done to help this process go more smoothly?</font>

Once you have a confirmation number, all you should need to do is call HHonors and have them send you or fax the hotel the GLON award certificate (I don't think VIP rewards are available online). What other paperwork are you waiting for?

I thought I'd read that people sometimes have trouble getting their GLON award certificate sent, and ours is coming from Scotland. Hopefully, that won't be a problem.

We had better luck booking an award stay in London too, but we still had some customer service problems with Hilton Honors. The first rep was very helpful, and told us that there were rooms available at several different properties. When we called back ten minutes later, the next rep told us there were NO rooms at any property. We told her there were plenty showing only moments before, but she didn't seem to care. Luckily, we had the name of the original rep, and he took care of things without incident.