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Most of us know that American Express has a new credit card with Hilton Hotels called Aspire.

The annual fee for the card is $450.

There are several specific benefits that come with the card, including a free weekend night at Hilton Hotels.

I believe that the wording in the T & C regarding the Hilton Hotels annual free weekend night is contradictory.

There is no confusion if you apply for the Aspire card; you get all the benefits that go with the card, and you pay the $450 annual fee.

However, if you are already an American Express card member and already have the Ascend American Express Hilton card and you elect to upgrade your existing card to the new Aspire card, and pay the same $450.00 annual fee, you lose the free “annual” weekend room after the first year.

I don’t get it. It makes no sense. The $450 fee continues annually but one of the benefits is taken away merely because you chose to upgrade rather than apply for a new card.

The benefit is called “annual free weekend night” but it will not be annual if you upgrade your card, it will be a one time thing according to the below quote from the T & C of American Express.

I called American Express and asked about the wording and the inconsistency. I was told that the wording does not mean what it says. That is, those who upgrade an existing American Express Hilton credit card to the annual $450 card will get the annual free weekend night.

That is fine and dandy for American Express to verbally say I will not lose the benefit. However, the T & C of the card state the opposite. It is what is said in writing that will rule for future benefits of the card.

Doesn’t the last line quoted below say that those who upgrade will not get the annual free weekend night after the first year?

Here is the wording copied from American Express T & C -

“You are only eligible to receive the Annual Weekend Night Reward once per year of Card membership, and you are only able to receive this benefit with an upgrade to the Hilton Honors Aspire Card one time. “

Can anyone offer a suggestion how to clear up this inconsistency?

I already upgraded and it does not seem to make sense to cancel the card only to reapply for it and pay the exact same annual fee.

cristo

sdsearch

My suggestion: Rreead and re-interpret. There is no inconsistency, there's at most lack of clarity.

I think it has something to do with upgrade timing, nothing more. If you apply from scratch, your Aspire card year starts from the beginning. But if you upgrade to the Aspire when the card you currently have is in the middle of a a year, you may not get a full first year on the Aspire. So your first year the Annual Weekend Night Reward has to be given through a special upgrade process, since you may have "missed" the start of the card year when it would have been given otherwise (or else simply missed the "new cardmember" phase that everyone else goes through instead).

Once you are done with your first (partial?) year of upgraidng, you are now back to the normal card year schedule that everyone is on, and at that point you are only eligible to receive the Annual Weekend Night Reward once per year of Card membership, because no longer treated as a separate "upgrade" holder of the card, but now treated the same as every other holder of the card.

Ie, the special upgrade status only last (up to) a year, and that's why you only get one free night from the special upgrade process. After that, you get the free nights a different way, but still get them.

So IMHO if there's anything wrong with the T&Cs, it's just that they're not as clear as you would like them to be. But IMHO they're not saying anything that you should be worried about, they're just saying it in a roundabout fashion.