<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Tino:
You knew that with the massive giveaways in the HH program inflation was going to eventually get you. I once scored 70,000 points for spending $300.
I'm not even sure that HH points are worth 0.6 cent. I recently tried to burn some points on an area that wasn't covered by Priceline (rural Pennsylvania). The run-down Hampton Inn was a 25,000 point award. The $69 rate looked better than blowing the points.
I was shocked at the "level inflation" over at Hilton. Are they now saying that two nights at a Hampton Inn is equivalent to a night at the Waldorf? According to the award chart, they are.</font>
Agreed - it's probably not easy to even milk .6c out of an HH point. I was giving them the benefit of the doubt, valuing 6 nights at HWV at around a grand or so. Yeah, you can beat that on Priceline, but they
did upgrade me to a great ocean-view room and provide free lounge access that we used at least twice a day. So for that week I was glad I used points instead of spending $850-900 on Priceline. (Of course, I got my two ALONs at 100k each, not 175k each.)
Using a 100k ALON at the HHV was a colossal waste of points. Using a 175k ALON there wouldn't even make sense. The hotel is in the midst of a concrete jungle. It is the antithesis of all of the wondrous charm of the other Hawaiian islands. And I think you can Priceline that area for $90/nt. or so.
I piled up 300,000 HH points mostly through 1-night Hampton stays, with an occasional Doubletree or Embassy mixed in. I did a lot of hotel-hopping to get the 16 stays needed for those two ALONs.