At the risk of bringing this thread back on topic may I suggest that we are the cause of the dilution?

Take Hilton for instance. How many of us who are doing the coded challenge (under which one is automatically made a Gold on sign-up, and gets 50K points for four stays in 60 or 90 days) actually received this invitation?

Obviously Hilton sent out the invitations to some people. I would suspect that they decided quite specifically who they wanted to extend the invitation to. I would suspect as well that if they had wanted to extend it to everyone in the world, they knew how to do so. An ad in WSJ, or USA Today comes to mind.

When you call in to register, the person at the Hilton end asks you for the promotion code, and if you know it she puts you in the promotion. She (or he) doesn't inquire as to where you got the code or whether you were ever actually invited to participate.

So, because the code was posted on FlyerTalk lots of us crashed the party. And now we're complaining that too many people are being allowed in? Can anyone say "chutzpah"?

What's the solution? I don't know. Maybe it is the United Airlines solution of targeted promotions that cannot be accepted by persons not actually invited. However, I invite the reader's attention to the threads on the United board that complain bitterly about such perceived "élitism". It would appear that to do so risks creating ill will amongst those already elite at Hilton that might outweigh the (intended) good will of the new invitees.

Maybe it is for just that reason that Hilton isn't rejecting gate-crashers. Maybe they figure that the (relative) few who become Gold using a code they weren't given won't have that much impact on the greater scheme of things. On the other hand, maybe Hilton isn't rejecting the uninvited because many/most of the habitués of this board strongly resemble the target audience for whom the promotion was originally intended - the frequent traveler. "After all," Hilton marketing might say to themselves, "What we're trying to do is to get them to stay at some of our properties and experience elite treatment in the hopes they'll shift their custom to our chain. If they do, we've gained more frequent users. If they don't come back, we haven't lost much since they're not putting additional drain on our elite resources after the promotion ends."

It's a problem. The dilution is greater than intended, but only because some of us have publicly posted an invitation that wasn't intended for everyone, and others of us are taking advantage of it. Not that I'm complaining the person who posted it shouldn't have done it (hey - I'm taking advantage of it too, even though I also am already Gold).

Personally, I'm happy it was posted, but I can recognize that the company probably did not intend it to be, and may not be happy that it was. After all, when they launched their promotion they undoubtedly carefully calculated how much "dilution" they thought they could afford, and invited accordingly. That uninvited people are showing up (thus increasing the dilutive effect) may well not make them happy either, to the extent that it adds more dilution.

Frankly, I'm afraid we sound too much like the guy who is allowed into a party to which he wasn't invited, and then says, "Now that I'm in, you really ought to close the door."