Originally Posted by
FlyerGoldII
PS-Of note - this hotel is Germany is NOT Hilton owned or managed - it is managed by a local hotel hospitality company - while I suspect the 2 hotels in USA are least Hilton managed, if not Hilton owned. I wonder if that too makes a difference.
That would be the norm the world over these days, relatively few hotels are directly managed, let alone owned, by any of the major chains. The notable exception is Accor but even they have half their hotels under franchise.
I would have to agree with the other posters above that it is difficult to give advice in this case, I think you can legitimately hide your privacy by changing a few details if you think it is important, but with every bit of dodgy grouting in hotel bathrooms being gloriously photographed on Tripadvisor, my feeling is that hotel chains are now fairly impervious to public criticism. That said hotels do own their customer service remedies - and have to pay for them. Occasionally Hilton Corporate will intervene and pay some points over to their better customers in particularly bad cases, but they would still look to recover them from the local hotel operator. So if your German hotel feels that you are not owed anything then I can see why there would be a stand off here. On the same lines, since the USA properties agreed that something(s) bad had happened, then it's in everyone's interest to resolve the matter with a generous point / certificate award. So I suspect the specifics matter more than you suggest.
The one thing we do very occasionally see on this forum are people who try it on just a bit too much and Hilton Corporate then close down the shutters on them. One case involved inter alia a hotel in Poland which I (and others) know to be pretty good if not outstanding in looking after guests, so having a string of complaints there and elsewhere eventually led to Corporate asking, well, telling them to find another hotel programme. Now 3 significant complaints over 3 or 4 years wouldn't be on the same scale, but at some point Corporate will lose interest. By way of comparison I think I've had 2 fairly modest sets of compensation points awarded to me over the last 500 stays in Hiltons globally, and one of those (for non-operational wifi at the LHR HGI) I didn't ask for. The other case was a bit more serious, being asked to leave the Conrad New York at 2 am, due to a bathroom flooding incident upstairs. Maybe 3 to 5k points each time?