Need

It's actually about the minimum point value that I would use before to book a reward stay at Hilton. Now if they would apply the same value to premium room it would be better. Right now it is like:

Standard room with no view:
$150 per night or 30000 PT

Premium room with Ocean View
$199 per night or 70000 PT

When paying with points, you don't have to pay resort fee and local taxes. So that $150 room that would have cost over $200 yield about .7 cents per point. It is actually pretty good. But for premium reward, I think they are using .3 cents or even lower.

arlflyer

Guys...I don't know how else to put this...the house always wins. We just play the game as best we can. Any other mindset is an exercise in futility.

wizla

Unfortunately that is a very true point you have there arlfyer, we now need to focus on how we can make this work for us.

bigjimbo99

+1 -- My Hilton timeshare is for sale, real cheap. No more juice in this orange, no more meat on the bone. It's all been sucked dry.

iahphx

Well, I was never "loyal" to Hilton. My chain hotel strategy has always been to get the highest status I could get for no real money or effort (mostly credit card sign-ups) and then exploit "loopholes" in their award charts. I try to have status and points in all the programs, and I use sites like Hotel Hustle to see if my destination has an attractive hotel redemption option. If it doesn't, I look to see if there's a good deal paying cash at a chain or non-chain property (I usally start at Kayak). If "cash" looks like the best option, I try to reduce the cash needed by using travel website promo codes, other discounts, and cashback.

The current "maximum point" guarantee is probably nearly worthless to me because I would think in 90% of circumstances, I'm going to find a better hotel deal than paying Hilton's maximum point rate. Remember, I'm looking for loopholes, not ordinary "fair market" redemptions.

In this case, it would seem like Honors is now basically a revenue-based award program. Those are useless to gamers like me, unless the currency is valuable. Like I sometimes transfer Chase UR points to Southwest because I have a companion pass and, even without it, Southwest points are worth about 1.7 cents in value. At .5 cents value, I don't see any real point in acquiring Honors points (unless there's a new, lucrative credit card sign up bonus I'm eligible for). For example, I now my supermarket purchases on my Honors Surpass card for 6x spending. My real grocery expenses are modest, but I do sometimes buy gift cards at grocery stores during special promotions (GCs below cost, free gas, etc). It would seem that now, however, the best I can do is receive a 3% return on these purchases with Surpass -- and I have to take that money in Hilton IOUs. That's almost never going to be the best rebate, right? It would only be the best deal if a Hilton stay was the best value IN CASH at my destination for that date. How often does that happen? Five or ten percent of the time?

Am I missing anything? Or should I find another credit card to use at supermarkets? If so, which one?

zachary

I agree that it appears that the ultimate goal is to say that 1 point is worth 1/2 cent. There may be some values above that for a while. But that sure looks like where we are headed. Two comments about that:

First, the thread focuses on the "burn" side, but not the "earn" side. On a $100 room at an ES, DT, or Hilton today, booked with the free AmEx, a Diamond earns 6,000 points ($30 @ 1/2 cent per point). That's about a 30% rebate (not factoring in taxes, but also not factoring in that there's no resort fees or taxes on award stays). What each person has to decide is whether that's good enough. I think it is for me, but YMMV. (For example, I don't have enough stays in big cities to be top tier in Hyatt or SPG, and my overall nights per year are too low for top tier at Marriott.)

Second, my real fear isn't what they've done up to now, but what's going to happen in the future. Southwest went to a revenue based award system years ago. The lessons that I drew from that are that you use your points as quickly as you can (since you always get the same amount per point, there's no reason to save points), and that it is really easy to devalue revenue based award redemption systems. Southwest started at 70 points per dollar when redeeming. I think it's now up to 78 points. Which, of course, takes you back to the part about redeeming as quickly as you can.

jeffandnicole

Never use just one example. And without much background info, it's hard to say if there was an apples-apples comparison, a glitch, or whatever...

FWIW, I've seen situations like that in NYC hotels quite often in the past, especially Sunday nights when rates then to be low. It wasn't hard to find deals where it would cost $100 for the room, or P&M of $109 + 24,000 points, for example.

Happy

Me too. My "breakeven" threshold is 0.005.

Things to keep in mind is when using full points, you dont pay taxes and other fees. Also you have the same flexibility as a flexible rate.

A big plus of reward booking, to us anyway, is the flexibility. We often have doubled / tripled bookings in different locations until much closer to a trip because we tend to change our itinerary quite often, sometimes with a small fee. Advance bookings do NOT work for us unless it is very last minute and we for sure would be in that city on that day.

nomad420

I do realize that this was just one poorly substantiated example but over the past several months and more recently since implementation of the "perks" to the HH system I am seeing this type of story more frequently. While I did convert my HC points over to HH points this year I don't think I will be doing it again in the future unless I see values remaining stable in the 0.005 and greater range. Even at that it really doesn't break even for me given the MF's.

Happy

Of course the Honors has gone revenue-based. Why would you still have doubt?

About Hotel Hustle - be ware its search result - when I tried it for the locations I was looking at, it returned false results as if no award being available (create Alert) yet there were awards. Sorry, Wandering Armean, the Hotel Hustle software has much left to desire.

What I tend to do these days is to go to TripAvisor and search hotels of a particular location, by review ranking. i can then see what chains have properties present and what are the general reviews. Much quicker to narrow down the possibilities as TripAdvisor these days display cash rates fairly closely match what you would find at Kayak. I would even venture to say, this is a quicker filtering process than your 2-step dance.

iahphx

Yeah, Hotel Hustle isn't perfect. I don't care that much if he doesn't show pricing -- I can doublecheck that. The bigger problem is when his hotel list isn't real time current. I guess it's more a labor of love than a business (does he get click-through cashback -- and how would that work on an award stay?). That said, I still think it's the best place to start. There are obviously other ways to do this, too, however.

Happy

He shows Cash Prices, just not award level - this to me is a major shortcoming. Without knowing how much is the points needed, what is the point to show prices? No pun intended.

My guess is he had a bigger "dream" in mind but quickly found out it took a lot more than he could give, in order to make the site worthwhile thus he could start monetize it. Note - when you click the Cash price, it brings you to the hotel booking site. So I am sure there is some incentives to be had. Unfortunately the site is not very useful for its initial intended purposes. Hence as of now it is a half-baked project and seems to die on the vine. Not everyone could monetize their internet efforts. It took years before AwardNexus and KVS finally gain traction for example.

And no, it is NOT the best place to start. At least I find it cumbersome. The Tripadvisor method works much better for me.

I have 2 10K properties booked when their cash prices are $75 and $100 respectively so it is very good value. On top of that, we would need them anyway as the properties are within 200 meters from the arrival halls, and on one flight we arrive at 10:30pm... I for one, am very grateful there is a 10K Hampton (the advance purchase is $75, flexible is $91). The redemption here actually has outsized value and actually meet our needs despite it is a lowly Hampton Inn! But it is brand new property though.

Oh, I found them on TripAdvisor and they ranked quite high on the list. Before searching TripAdvisor I never thought about Hilton family would have properties in those locations!

craz

I can pay $111 or use 24k of cause MVP comes to $91 so no way 24k, reg rate is $97 so how did they come up with 24k, it s/b 20k

That said even 20k doesnt pay since with 2 promos (Ok 3, 2K,+1K with HH Amex and 500 miles to AA ) Id rather pay for the stay. But if they cut out the promos its gonna simply be time to blow thru my stash, since they never will be worth much more then .005 any longer except in very rare situations that can no longer be counted on

iahphx

You can also try awardmapper.com. No cash prices, which I tend to think is less useful, but there are some better features here, too. I'm not sure who keeps the most current hotel list.

Happy

Trust me - try TripAdvisor to see the availability of chain hotels which you will see the cash prices upfront. Then hop to the program sites to check on the point level for the selected possibilities.

Much faster to filter out your options this way.