Thanks for continuing to stay off topic after promising to stop in a prior post about this.

There are many possible explanations for why you had the problem, but they're all off-topic in this thread.

My Barclay Aviator Red card worked PIN the only time I tried it in Norway, at a rural unmanned gas station late at night where no pin-less card I had would work. There was my only trip to Europe since getting that card, and it was the only situation on that trip in which my PIN-less cards didn't work. And i sort of "forced it", in that I didn't really need to get gas at that location, but I wanted to see what would happen if I tried.

On other trips to Europe before that, where I had only my Diners Club USA card with an EMV PIN, on each trip I ran into at most one place where PIN-less cards wouldn't work but the PIN card would. But I also ran into other situations where no foreign cards worked at all, or where kiosks were plain broken, too.

So PIN is not a panacea. In some places it helps get you out of a fix, in many places it makes no difference, and in some places the number of kiosks that don't take foreign cards of any sort way outnumbers the number of kiosks which take foreign cards but demand a PIN card.

However, to get back on topic, you can't get EMV PIN with a Hilton card, since Citi's Hilton cards are Visa cards (and USA-based Visa cards don't support PIN as a rule), and Amex USA doesn't tend to support PIN either.