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Old Sep 25, 2018, 8:40 am
  #8  
pinniped
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Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: MCI
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Posts: 52,501
Originally Posted by hbcobra
How much risk do you think there is in banking points now and waiting until summer 2020 to redeem them?
The last big systemwide devaluation was early 2017 (I think). That's when the entire concept of categories was scrapped, but Hilton still promised to keep a "max rate" on each property for a standard room. Those caps are still there - if you go look at most desirable properties in the system and find a standard room, you'll often find it for 95,000 points per night regardless of the room rate. The biggest change for me was down in the middle of the pack properties: places that were once 30k/nt were suddenly 60k. Once every few years I'd do a 5-night top-end HH stay, but throughout the year I used to do a lot of 1- or 2-night 30k stays for your basic $200-250 room. Those awards became a lot harder to find.

I think of you're looking top end, the trying to get to 380,000 points for 5 nights at a top property, you're *probably* safe as long as it's somewhere not at risk of gaming the standing room thing entirely. If you're redeeming summer '19 to travel summer '20, I'd feel more comfortable than if you mean redeeming summer '20 to travel in '21. Any kind of time horizon longer than a year worries me with HH.

The next shoe to drop, without much fanfare, could easily be that the property caps disappear, killing the idea of any kind of aspirational award once and for all. It becomes purely a cash-equivalent program where your revenue stays simply become pieces of future Hampton Inn nights or whatever. The Southwest of hotel programs. That can still be lucrative - especially if you earn 70 points per dollar like you can now with promotions and such - but it's not nearly as fun as when you can redeem points for the Maldives, W=A, or whatever else you might not book for yourself if you didn't have a loyalty program.
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