Originally Posted by
iahphx
This is my first year with a significant number of HH hotel stays (I'd be playing the SPG program, and signed up for a HH credit card after the initial SPG devaluation). I've never looked at the earning choices for hotel stays that carefully, and always assumed I'd be "better off" maximizing hotel points and not "double-dipping" with airline miles.
But now I'm less sure. Hilton seems to offer plenty of promos for extra airline miles, but not promos for extra HHonors points. Like right now I'm looking at a fall promo that gives you a double credit on Southwest for every HHonors stay (basically, you get 1/16 of a domestic airline ticket for every stay). That seems to be significantly more lucrative than the extra HHonors points unless you're staying many nights or running up a huge hotel tab.
Any suggestions on when to take extra HHonors points and when to take the airline miles would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
It depends a lot on your stay patterns (and willingness to change them!). With the BMI exception, most airlines give you the same number of miles (or in the Southwest case, credits) for a one-night stay as a three-week stay, and the same number of miles for a cheap suburban stay as an expensive midtown Manhattan stay (at the same brand, anyway). But the hotel gives you points proportional to your cost, which is in turn proportional to both the cost/night and the number of nights in your stay.
If you're willing to "hotel hop" (change between hotels nightly), or "naturally" have only one-night hotel stays, then in most cases (some big city very expensive hotels excepted perhaps) it'll tend to be better to get miles, especially if you collect with an airline (like Southwest) that doesn't penalize you for Hampton. (With most airlines, you get 500 miles/stay at Hilton, HGI, DT, ES, etc, but only 100 miles/stay at Hampton. But with Southwest, you get 0.5 credits normally at all brands, and 1.0 credits now with this double credit promotion at all brands.)
If you have longer stays and are not willing to "hotel hop", then you have to do your own math to figure out at which point you want to change between earning miles/credits and earning more points.
Btw, in case you're not familiar with it, "hotel hopping" is necessary because of the universal definition of "stay" all hotel famlies use: "A stay is defined as any number of consecutive nights at the same hotel,
no matter how many times you check in or out." So you can't trick HHonors into giving you miles per night at the same hotel just by making separate one-night reservations but staying put (or even changing rooms). You have to at least alternate between two different hotels on alternate nights to get miles/credits for every night.