Guava

Your point is a valid one though I wouldn't worry too much about it at this point. What we are doing here so far are educated guesses and speculations based on existing comparable. Given Hilton's history of poor communication to customers, even if they start to implement these new awards in the next week or so, it will likely be a while before their front line staff are sufficiently trained to convey to us the correct information and details we want to know. Chances are, there will be a lot of confusion. I guess giving the readers here a sense of what to expect so that they don't hope for too much is probably a good reality check so that some people won't go ballistic when they find out they can't upgrade to Suite for only 10-20K points more as they would hope.

Coming back to the concern you raised, Hilton has so far opted not to go the route that SPG often uses re: some of their resort properties. One of the main weaknesses of SPG is the overly liberal use of non-standard room. There are just too many properties that are granted exceptions here and there, too many to count. And the prices on those non-standard room properties using points tend to be outrageous. Hilton has quite a few high end resorts that consist mainly of villas that are more or less equal to properties that SPG would consider "non-standard rooms available", all the Maldives properties would be for instance and so are the French Polynesian ones and a few others in the Indian Ocean like Seychelles, just to name a few I can remember right now. They have not gone the way of SPG in attempting to charge double or more for these properties in terms of point cost. What they have done is restrict availability and impose other limitations such as disallowing Diamond Forced Availability but to my knowledge, the most expensive award you could pay on a per night basis is the Grand Wailea and W=A Maldives at 80K for high season. Not a single property that I can think of asks for say double of their assigned category, for example Category 7 Level X 2 = 50K X 2 = 100K, which is actually very common at SPG. I think Hilton will maintain their existing definition where awards will be available based on Standard Room availability simply because we know already what Standard Rooms are for these existing properties that are virtually all Villas. Then again, a lot of things are changing and some of these high end redemption at these exclusive resorts have been too good to be true for quite a long time using HH points. I hope they don't change this long standing policy but the more I think about it, the more I think your concern is probably a real one and we could see a select number of properties with increased point cost as a result.