Thanks for your nice post.

Sadly though, as you have read in so many of these threads, the issue is with the Hilton marketing and loyalty program.

With one of us traveling 75% of the time for business and the other having only 2 weeks vacation per year, you can see why it becomes so difficult to use the points we have earned the hard way – it would have taken a few years to use all the points. While the ‘free night certificate’ was nice, it was wholly inadequate and it did virtually nothing to compensate for the lost weeks of award stays.

Prior to devaluation, we remained very loyal to Hilton and primarily stayed at Hilton properties when traveling on our own $ (short weekend trips, etc.) Now, business travel stays are spread out at Marriott, Hyatt, Starwood, IHG, and occasionally Hilton. For personal travel, well, we have seen weeks of award stays just evaporate ‘into thin air’ and now we use the least expensive manner to get nice quality rooms. We have had tremendous success getting excellent rates using Priceline (which includes quite a few nice Hiltons) and we will continue to do so.

This devaluation by Hilton has certainly caused us to focus on the best ROI for us. Bad move Hilton. We love the IHG promotion and only wish that Marriott had gone after Hilton in the same way - it would have been great.