Originally Posted by
amanuensis
That's why, long, long ago, I picked Hilton to be the focus of my travel. It clearly had the best mid-tier and I was not traveling enough to have a shot at any chain's high tier. Hilton used to have a wonderful feature whereby you could trade airline miles for Hilton points and then use those points for the GLON award. Those of you too new to know what GLON was can find many threads mentioning it. Read 'em and weep at what you never got to experience.
I used to have no trouble getting airline miles to exchange for the Hilton points because long distance phone companies used to give miles away like candy for doing things that cost little or nothing, and you could repeat, repeat, repeat. Those were the days.
I remember when I was only gold with Hilton years ago, I got better treatment in the US than I do now as a diamond but that was back in the days before they handed out status like candy.
I miss the double dipping days and getting 1/2 southwest credit per stay. I really miss the promo they used to have late in the year where you got bonus hilton miles plus I believe 1000 MQMs per stay. One year they had the promo where you got a free night certificate after so many stays (was a pretty minimal number for each stay). I was travelling a lot back then and would hotel hop every night for the delta mqms and to get the most free night certs. Between the free night certs, the Delta MQMs and bonus miles and the Hilton points from my car rental (and I also think they were running a triple point promo that quarter also) I did really good. I really miss the diamond force on award stays. There were a couple years I got the Double Tree times square suites for like 50K points a night on new years eve when rooms were going for well over $1K a night.
Southwest used to have a generous program as well. I would only fly them DTW/BNA or DTW/MDW once in a while on a paid ticket for work and they were lucky to get four paid flights a year from me and I got at least 15 free flights a year just from their credit card and Hilton stays and rental cars. When that program went bye-bye so did me flying southwest.