Per the HHonors rules, the member the reservation is made under must be present and pay.

Enforcement, however, is hit-or-miss. I almost always book rooms in my name for my wife. I'd say 90% of the time they just take her card as the form of payment and everything posts to my account correctly. The other 10% of the time they just let her know the stay won't earn points for me, but they don't give her any grief beyond that. In some cases the points still post even when they tell her they won't.

For example, this weekend she was in Anaheim for the Disneyland Half Marathon. I booked her at the Anaheim Hilton for 3 nights and then at the LAX Hilton the night before she flew home. At the Anaheim Hilton they informed her there would be no points, but still gave her Gold Breakfast Certs (for the Starbucks) and the Gold Internet Login still worked too. At the Hilton LAX they didn't mention any discrepancy, she was upgraded to Exec level, and used the lounge for breakfast without issue. The LAX stay is now showing as pending, and the Anaheim stay isn't showing at all, so I assume there indeed won't be any points posted for that stay.

I'm not going to raise any fuss when points aren't posted as those are the rules, but I'll take the points (and more important to me, the stay credits) when they do.