eponymous_coward

I'm staying at said aforementioned dump next week to finish a Gold challenge, to the tune of 19,000 points and ~.5 cpp.

I've redeemed for the Hilton Millennium in Bangkok for 17k points (two nights). So I think HH point prices do go under a "floor", from what I can tell, but the resort fees come into play on setting that floor, but taxes don't (Bangkok has a 10%++ on hotels.)

Happy

And that AMEX is giving out a 75K /$3K upgrade to Surpass without lifetime restriction to our Blue cards. Saw that at the top of the account page when logged in with the old interface, and is in the AMEX offer body when logged in with the current interface. No thanks. Not interested. The $3K would work better elsewhere be it a straight cash rebate or to msr on other cards.

jn in ca

That's the important thing.

I always roll my eyes when I see people write "I get ## points" and they include the points from the HH credit card. Not quite, because there is an opportunity cost. You have to factor in the cost of points you could have gotten by using a different card.

sdsearch

Except that conversion from HH no-AF Amex to HH Surpass Amex presumably does not appear as a new account on your credit report (it backdates to whenever you first opened the HH no-AF card), and thus does not affect your Chase 5/24 status. While for a brand new card, it would affect your Chase 5/24 sttatus unless it's a business card. So for those trying to get to or stay under 5/24 and with few ideas on business cards they can apply for, it might be worth more than for someone who doesn't care whether they apply for a personal card or not.

Happy

I know that. Been there and done that with the 100K Upgrade offer 18 months ago.

We are talking about the value of the HH points in this thread, not the reason why some may take this offer due to the Chase 5/24 rule.
My point is, the Hilton points are so devalued that I see the $3K spend to earn the bonus NOT worthwhile because there are other cards compete with the Minimum Spend, not to mention the 2x cash back cards. Hence as jin in ca pointed out, one has to factor in the opportunity cost before taking the AMEX upgrade offer. Even the HH Gold status, there are other ways to get it, without incur the fee-based cards. Plus one has to look at the upcoming travel plan to see if there are really some full service Hilton properties to justify having the fee-based card.
As an example, in recent travels we have found that there are some Hampton Inns in Eastern Europe actually are quite good, while everyone gets the decent breakfast without the need to be elite. Therefore, what the travel plan in the next 3 to 6 months would also influence whether the offer is worthwhile or not.
Gone are the days when one just cumulate points indiscriminately especially on points like HH that have devalued so much, yet AMEX still wants such a high spend to earn - that just does not compute.

pinniped

Even in a worst-case scenario, 75k HH are worth $375. So it's certainly worth $3,000 in regular spend.

Maybe not worth spending a dime over that, but I'd go ahead and use the card for a couple weeks - even for base-level regular spending - and accept the points. Unless there's a 13% cashback card out there...

BrlDsguise

May as well factor in the 9K points (or more) you will get for $3K in spending on top of the 75K which brings the value up to $420 or 14%.

hurnik

It may or may not (back date)

My GE Synchrony Bank Care Credit card just converted to a Master Card but the 3 CRA all show this a brand new account (date opened does not show 10+ years ago), so there goes one more ding for the Chase 5/24.

Citi/Amex may be different, but don't know until it happens and you check your 3 CRA reports.

sdsearch

There should datapoints on the noAF->Surpass upgrade and how it appears on credit reports already out there somewhere. These upgrades have been available for many years, and Amex stopped backdating every new card early in 2015, so any datapoints about a noAF->Surpass upgrade done mid-2015 onwards should be valid for what happens now. It's just that I don't know where on FT those datapoints would be.

Meanwhile, your post is not clear on what your GE card was and became. Did it convert from one MC to another, or from Visa to MC, or what? You didn't say which network the original card was on, and you didn't saying anything about the card it converted to except that was an MC network card. If it converted from Visa to MC, that's not something that can happen at Amex-the-bank, since Amex-the-bank only issues credit cards on the Amex network, not on any other networks.

So I'm not saying Citi is different (I don't know how Citi reports Visa -> MC changes), but Amex is different in that an Amex card can't possibly change networks, the way cards at many other banks can.

Happy

That is only when you spend the points at a HH property which also means you are foregoing other potentially better options for a stay.

There are plenty of other better options than a HH property in our travel path. In fact quite often, there is not even a HH property available. As a result, we only stayed in a Hilton property 2 times (Hilton Abu Dhabi in January and Hilton Tallinn in May) the whole year of 2017 when we have 3x 30+ days long trip plus some shorter jaunts up to now. On both HH stay occasions we could have stayed at other brands but forced ourselves to stay at Hilton so we could use up some of the points in the account, given the Hilton properties are more or less comparable. The rest of the 60 some hotel nights, not a single HH property would fit either by location or by value proposition. Therefore, the $375 is only a theoretical number of funny money. Using that calculation we currently still have over $2500 funny money that dont meet our needs. We dont need any more funny money that would continue to devalue. In fact, if it is not against program rule, I would happily sell those points at 90% discount for cash the real money. LOL. YMMV of course.

Here is another example why the $3K required spend is ridiculous for the HH pts. Just got the DL targeted offer at 60K/$3K spend, and 60K/$1K spend. DL miles has a floor of $0.01 value to buy DL ticket when you own a DL card. There, the $3K spend get you TWICE the value, WITHOUT AF the first year.... and we could certainly use a DL ticket every now and then. There is also a $50 statement credit on DL purchase - so it is a total of $600 value on $1K or $3K spend depending on the offer, plus an additional $50 GC. This makes the HH offer very weak.

Recently there are some variation of cash back cards offer quite high sign up bonus - $200 / $500 spend from TD Bank, 3x restaurant 2x grocery 1x everything else. 0 FTF, 0 AF. $250/$500 spend from 5th3rd bank with similar structure. The required spend is a whole lot less, and there is no AMEX RAT to monitor your spend in case you need some help outside the organic spend... Just sayin.

In short, in the days and age when one needs to carefully weigh on which cards to sign up, take in all the factors to consider, the HH bonus is way back in the queue. Again, this is very individual. Many here would have different priorities.

Happy

I believe the key is the account number has to stay the same in order to keep the same status quo. Hence the up and down grade of the same type of cards, even product change (in Citi case from one TYP card to another TYP card), the card retains the same account number, therefore remains the same account on the CRA reports.

In your case the card changes from a Visa to MC, hence it got a new account number and became a new account, unfortunately.

pinniped

OK, yes, I guess one could apply this caveat to every post in the history of Flyertalk: we'll all assuming that people here collecting points actually have the ability to someday use them. HHonors, being a massive global hotel chain with more individual brands than I can count, is one I assume most Flyertalkers occasionally cross paths with in some city somewhere.

Great. Do the first one. Do the second one. Buy a DL flight. Buy another DL flight. Redeem the 120-130k miles for a great flight. All of that is low-hanging fruit, but wouldn't affect my decision one way or another on completing the HH sign-up bonus. If a hotel chain and an airline *both* offer me easy bonuses, I'll take 'em all even if one is superior to the other. (Thinking of these one-time signup bonuses for using a credit card for a few weeks max.)

These are much less interesting to me...I don't usually open new credit lines just for $250 to get cards I have no interest in ever using. I'm not sure what the AMEX RAT thing means...I have 3 Amexes, but have never done anything beyond "organic" spend. (I'm not an MS guy.)

Maybe I need to see more of the queue. In recent years, I've gravitated away from airline cards and towards hotel cards, mainly because they more than pay for themselves on an ongoing basis. Also have TYP (Citi Prestige) but might switch this to CSR next year. It wouldn't surprise me if early 2018 has six-figure HH signup bonuses for the top card.

hurnik

No worries, I guess we won't know until it happens.

The card was a GE Carecredit card (you see them all over the place at your dentist, vet, etc.)
GE sold that to Synchrony Bank (or spun off their credit division to Synchrony, regardless).
This was a specialized card (not a Visa, MC, Discover).

Synchrony converted this to a Mastercard (I certainly didn't ask for it, it just showed up, as an "exciting new benefit") with the Carecredit system (you get like 0% financing for 6, 12, 18, and 24 months depending on the place and how much you charge for "medical" type things).

I'll have to go back and look and see what happened when my USAirways Barclay card converted to the Barclay AAdvantage red card (did it show up as a new account), although that's with the same bank, so the results may be different.

Guess we'll just have to wait and see, I just wouldn't say 100% for sure that it's not going to show up as a new account/card when the Citi card converts to an Amex card.

sdsearch

I wasn't talking about Citi converting to Amex.

Happy and I were talking about the Amex offer to upgrade the Amex no-AF HH card to the Amex Surpass card (currently $75 AF). No bank changes involved!

Then you replied (to a post where I spelled out that it was an Amex-to-Amex upgrade) and you said that it may or may not show up as a new account.

So was your whole discussion above because you didn't realize we were only talking about an Amex-to-Amex conversion? (Same bank, same network, only new name of card.)

Of course it's very likely that a Cit card that converts to an Amex will show up as a new account. I was never disputing that. In fact, that's why I cancelled my Citi no-AF HH card back on Nov 1.

It's just much less likely that an Amex card "product upgraded" from a no-AF version to an AF version (staying at Amex) would show up as a new account.

And the latter is what I said there should be datapoints of already, somewhere.

HawkeyeFlyer

Are you saying 1 to 2 cents per point? or one half cent per point.....a bit hard to follow