paul00

I just made a successful Price Match Guarantee claim over the phone. The call took 30 mins. Price matched the Hilton 'South East Asia Flash Sale' non-refundable room rate against the ebookers non-refundable room rate (which was lower both before and after tax).

nunogomes

paul00, which hotel was this?

Moreton

I recently made a BRG claim for the Hilton Diagonal Del Mar Barcelona. Due to my concerns that the process wouldn't be particularly smooth if I tried to make the claim by email/web form I telephone the booking line. As the rate I was comparing were both non-refundable I wanted to lock in the price before making the HHonors booking. Using the local booking line (0870) I was charged national call rates and the call last 50 minutes resulting in a call cost of about Ł25 (something to factor into any cost saving).

Though the call took a long time the process was pretty straight forward. As I hadn't yet made my booking and gave the call handler my prefered location and dates and he priced up the hotel on the HHonors booking system (4 nights x 175 euro plus taxes). The lower price was found on Agoda.com (4 nights x 151 euro plus taxes) and throughout the process I checked to make sure that the rate was still available and mentioned that I had screen grabs of everything if that would be helpful.

As others have commented the call handler mentioned needing to check that the Agoda website was on Hilton's approved list - but fortunately this turned out not to be a problem. After approximately 45 minutes of being on and off hold the call handler confirmed the success of the price guarantee and I received an email confirmation approximately 5 minutes after the call ended.

With the 25% reduction on the best price my booking totalled 452 euro plus taxes a saving of 248 euro (though I should really factor in the cost of the call approx 30 euro).

Good luck!

WeiBen

100 Queen's Gate Hotel London, Curio Collection by Hilton

Queen Room, Semi Flex, 3 Nights

Hilton.com: GBP616
Booking.com: GBP515

New Rate: GBP387

Claim was made over the phone

escape4

When I started using Hilton BRG a while back, I got several claims declined because I was doing something slightly wrong and over time I learned how Hilton was picky and I adjusted how I file claims. My success rate subsequently improved significantly. At one point I was so successful that I started being more courageous and even filed BRGs on pre-paid rates because I was confident enough that I would not be stuck with a prepaid booking at higher rates if my BRG was being declined. For the most part this kept working well, on occasion I had BRGs declined but that's because the third party site had just changed their rates in the previous few hours since I filed my BRG claim so I felt it was appropriate for my claim to be denied. It happens, and it's part of the process. On occasion my claims were denied for questionable reasons, but if I responded to Hilton's email to challenge it, often times it was subsequently approved. Or sometimes I would cancel, re-book, and resubmit a new BRG claim, and be successful on the second try.

I could observe in this thread some people with very few posts complaining about their BRG request being denied. Without having the details of all such cases, I thought these people must not be very experienced with the subtleties of the Hilton BRG process, just like I was at the beginning. It does not make the Hilton BRG process completely useless - people just need to learn how to use it. Or so I thought. However there are also some people in this thread who for sure absolutely know what they are doing and whose opinion I respect, for example @craigthemif. He has previously expressed the opinion that Hilton BRG is a "scam", which was a surprise to me because it simply did not match my experience. I brushed it off and just assumed he (or others making similar comments) was having a bad day when he posted this and was venting?

But now I am wondering if I am starting to join that camp. Recently my experience has done a complete 180. I am getting refusals left and right for the most ludicrous reasons, for example:
1- Hilton says third party website has an admin fee, which is plain not true especially since I got several BRGs approved from that site before. I even provided a screen shot to prove the lack of admin fee, but Hilton's answer deflects the subject and uses another reason to decline since they cannot rely on the admin fee to decline.
2- Hilton says the third party website is in a different currency than the currency of the hotel so they cannot approve. In the past I had several claims approved in different currencies: they just convert at market rates, as one would expect.
3- I filed BRG with one website, it was denied, I canceled and re-book, submitted a new claim for the new reservation but using a different third party website, and my new claim is denied because the third party website is not the same as for the first booking I made. Why does the second claim have to be for the same site as the first claim which was denied? New reservation, new BRG claim. I have done so in the past and it never was a problem.

Etc.

So right now, nothing works for me. Responding and challenging to a decline email is met with another decline for equally bad reasons, sometimes during this challenge back and forth the rate on the third party website changes and it becomes a genuine decline so I give up. However cancel and rebook no longer works either, I now get more declines and sometimes like #3 above the decline seems to be related to having resubmitted the claim in the first place!

I find it hard to believe that I was simply lucky before and that now it's just bad luck. It's not like I suddenly became inexperienced and unknowledgeable. I am just speculating for the fun of it, but I am wondering if it could be that Hilton can mark someone as being a heavy BRG user and at that point how they handle BRG for that person changes? Could it be that other experienced folks who said Hilton BRG was a scam were actually correct but their experience was just different than mine because I was not labeled a heavy BRG user yet and they were? Or could it be that there has been a recent change and Hilton is tightening up the rules? Recent posts in this thread do not support this theory as others have had success.

Bottom line I feel like Hilton can do what it wants so if they just want to decline my BRG claims for ridiculous reasons, in all honesty they are free to do so, and in response I am free to go back to Marriott and other hotel chains; I won't complain about it; I can simply adapt to the new reality. My point here is not to complain, but more to submit a new data point for my experience for the benefit of others.

I am also curious to find out if others had this experience of seeing their success rate plummet.

Alternatively perhaps I should start using the phone route instead of electronic BRG and see if it's any better? What is the phone number that you guys use? Or perhaps I should take a time out from Hilton BRG and see if they take me out of the penalty box after a hiatus?

Cat88L3

I call the Diamond Desk for my BRG...I get immediate results. Also, if a rep is playing ignorance as to where the room/hotel is on the website. I can guide them properly. I have had a 4 out of 6 success rate with BRG. Also, the sites that you use is a factor. I always call. Can't be bothered with the emails and I think there is a higher success rate with the phone .

RafKa

I absolutely echo your comments: when I first started using Hilton's BRG 6-7 months ago I had no problems getting them approved. Over the last 3 months however, all of them are refused, for a number of ludicrous reasons. Most frustrating is the cancellation policy, which I've had refused because there was a 1min difference to the OTA's policy, and quite strangely even when the OTA cancellation deadline is more generous than Hilton's they flat oro refuse since they claim they must exactly match.

The few times I tried over the phones, the agents simply claim they can't see the lower rate so it's your word against theirs... I stopped bothering as it was costing me 30 mins of my life for each time I called...

craigthemif

To be fair to @escape4, over the last 6-12 months I've had 2 successful Hilton BRG claims. (out of 50+ attempts)

Both were against Agoda, where at a couple of hotels there seemed to a glitch that matched the semi-flex cancellation policies with Hilton.com. Most of the time Agoda's semi-flex or flex policies simply aren't aligned (i.e. even though they say 3 days they actually mean 4). I am quite confident that this is Hilton guidance to its franchisees to avoid the cost of BRG claims.

As far as calling for prepaid rates, I simply avoid prepaid whenever humanly possible. Besides the obvious waste of time whilst the agents deliberately or ignorantly don't find the lower rates...

escape4

All I can say is that you are one resilient man

escape4

On my side, I have seen declined BRGs even when they do not have a shred of legitimate argument to stand on such as the cancellation policy being off by one hour. One recent 'incident' is that they refused a BRG claim because the room types did not match according to them, yet on that BRG claim the names were a perfect match. The truth is that they can pull this off and I am not sure there is much I can do about it. It is what it is, gotta accept it and adapt.

teo1991

Tried BRG for the 1st time few months back in September
so far no rejects yet 6/6 ( 1 of them was rejected initially and subsequently a few times with lots of email back and forth with proofs but after a few hours Hilton came back and said they can honour the match)

freppa87

Just had a similar issue with trip.com and Conrad Singapore, where both where same flexibility but trip.com required prepayment. I asked if the purpose of the BRG service was to retain customers, not to make them book on 3rd party sites for which they had no answer to.

Any idea to try again? The difference was substancial (735SGD hilton vs 500SGD trip.com for a 2-night stay).

rj123456

I was all set to declare Hilton a bunch of scamsters.

I saw a really good rate for Embassy Suites Boulder CO on priceline.com.
I called the Hilton phone number and they absolutely could not find the rates I was seeing.
Interestingly, the Priceline rate said "because you booked a rental car with priceline" (which I had done a couple of days ago).

I opened a new MS Edge window (Priceline was open in Chrome) and searched for the same date and location.
Lo behold Priceline was showing me (in a different browser) the same rates that the Hilton phone reps said they were seeing.

escape4

Indeed I would try again. I have had approvals on prepaid & refundable rates before. Not all agents will refuse, some can accept.

kspeed88

I recently used the BRG service. As it was my first attempt, I tried the least risky option of not having a booking (which is a valid option under the Hilton BRG terms), but you have to contact them by phone for this purpose. It was a sizable saving I was pursuing - Ł250 saving on a 3 night stay, so I was fairly motivated to get it approved. The lower rate I found was on Hotels.com
In the end, I had to speak to 6 agents I think, and it took over two hours of my time.
Each agent decided to think of a new reason as to why they could not honour the BRG. And every time we reached an impasse, I naturally concluded the call, and tried again (not explaining to the next operator that I had been declined). Two of the operators hung up on me (I was not rude or abusive) so this seemed like they had run out of excuses to decline my claim so just hung up instead. Some of the reasons they used was that they said they could not see the rate (it was definitely a public rate and I was not logged in to Hotels.com), that the rate on Hotels.com did not include the service charge (it explicitly did), you can't do BRG if you don't have a booking already with Hilton (that's not what their T&Cs say) etc. etc.
I got there in the end, but what an incredibly frustrating experience it was. Saying that, for a big enough saving, I would go through it all again.