How to Earn & Use Hilton Honors Points for Hotel Stays - A Beginner’s Look
One of the most intimidating things, in my opinion, when planning a trip is not the flights but rather, how to plan your hotels without blowing your entire budget on where you stay. While flights can be expensive when traveling, your hotel costs can easily eclipse the cost of your flights, especially when you’re on a longer 2-to-3-week trip. And I remember early on in my points journey I was never really focused on flights too much. In my mind, the flight only lasts for so long. But once you’re at your destination, the time spent in your home away from home will surpass the time you spent on the flight to get there.
To add to the complexity, at least in my case, by the time I was really getting into credit card points I was approaching the back half of my 20s. For me, I wanted a way to stay in really nice hotel rooms but not pay an astronomical amount to do so. If you want to read about what I’m planning for our upcoming trip to Japan, you can check out my post about that HERE. Now don’t ask me where this bougie side of me came from but at this point there’s no turning back, and I’ve enjoyed the game of trying to find nice places for my wife and I to stay at when we travel and relieve ourselves of the financial burden because of the points that I have saved up. For more context, when I was still in my 20’s I didn’t travel nearly as much as I do now. Most of my trips were over extended weekends and, in some cases, split between multiple people in a group or I was staying with family. Because of this I don’t recall using points to pay for too many things early on, but I was figuring out ways to accumulate them.
A Few Options For You
When it comes to hotels, there’s several brands you can choose from. The most common three that people usually stay with are Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. There are benefits to each one but personally I have come to like and use Hilton for a majority of our travels. Now of the three brands Hilton is number two when it comes to total number of properties globally. What this translates to is that you can travel to a good number of locations (139+ countries) around the world and chances are you’ll be able to find a Hilton property or at least one of its 25 to 26 brands that fall under the Hilton umbrella. So, we’ve confirmed that the Hilton portfolio gives you options when travelling around the world, but what about the point system. Now of the three brands I mentioned, Hilton’s points are worth the least. They typically hover around $0.005-$0.006 per point. Marriott is usually around $0.007 per point and Hyatt is $0.017 per point. You might be looking at the numbers and find yourself asking “why would you choose Hilton over Hyatt or even Marriott?”
Now while yes Hyatt has a great cent per point value and they also don’t use dynamic pricing (they categorize different properties in set tier levels and there’s certain point values assigned for each given tier). For me, it’s the fact that they don’t have nearly as many properties as Marriott and Hilton and, at least for my strategy don’t have as good of multipliers to earn points quickly. Now for some of you that may be into credit card points already might be saying “well you could use Chase and/or Bilt to transfer points earned on those cards to Hyatt”. My strategy is to use my flexible points currencies to solely book our flights when my wife and I travel. You can read more about it HERE where I talk about how I’m planning to book our flights to Japan. I chose this strategy because now I don’t have to feel torn about using my flexible points currencies on flights or hotels.
Earning Hilton Honors Points
So how did this lead me to Hilton? It came down to credit card multipliers. A long time ago, I got the Hilton Honors American Express card. This was back when the Honors program used two H’s in its name. For those that have been in the game for a while will know what I mean. The reason I was drawn to the card was because for non-categorized spending you would be given 3 points per dollar. Now admittedly, this was back before I knew about cent per point value, so I’m sure I thought I was getting a good points earning for my spending at the time. Little did I know, that decision would end up shaping a big part of my credit card strategy years later. The card I had back then was essentially the free version of the Hilton Honors card currently offered by American Express. The point multipliers on that card are as follows: 7x per dollar spent with Hilton, 5x per dollar on restaurants, gas, and groceries, 3x per dollar on everything else. Now along with that the card also gives you Hilton Honors Silver Status. For being a standard Hilton member you earn 10 Base Points per dollar spent at Hilton properties. Silver Status gives you and additional 20%, meaning you would earn 12 points per dollar. If you couple that with the 7x points per dollar you get by using your Hilton card, now you’re earning 19x per dollar. And this is with the no annual fee card!
Eventually, I upgraded my card to the Hilton Honors Surpass card. This card offers some changes but now with an annual fee. Initially the annual fee was $95 but a few years back American Express raised it to $150. Base multiplier stays the same at 3x per dollar, the 5x per dollar categories (gas, groceries, and restaurants) go up to 6x per dollar. And the last category, your Hilton spend multiplier goes up to 12x per dollar spent at Hilton. Another benefit is that you now get complimentary Hilton Gold Status which gives you an 80% boost over the basic membership points earning. This means just for being a Hilton Gold Member, you would earn 18x per dollar spent at Hilton. Now combine that with the Surpass credit card’s 12x per dollar, you’re now earning 30x per dollar spent at Hilton. The other perk of this card that I’ve been able to enjoy is the Free Night Award (FNA) that you can earn once you spend $15,000 in a calendar year on the card. Hilton’s FNAs are another reason that I choose them over Marriott and Hyatt because they have one of the easiest FNAs to use. They’re pretty much good at any resort around the world (there is an exclusion list that you can find HERE) as long as there is a Standard room available to book. But there’s no points cap or any other hoops to jump through aside from that. Now because of some special rules during the global pandemic and then our travel spend from our honeymoon a few years ago, I’ve been able to earn Hilton Diamond Status for a few years in a row. This increases my points earning to 20x per dollar (10 for being a Hilton Member and then being Diamond adds 100% or 10 points on top of that). So that coupled with my credit card, I’ve essentially been earning 32x per dollar if I pay for a Hilton property out of pocket. So, I’ve been able to amass a large amount of points that I plan on using for our next trip to Japan that I discuss HERE.
Spending Hilton Honors Points
I’ve been talking a lot about how Hilton points are easier to earn because of the potential for high multipliers, but what about spending points. Earlier in this post I mentioned that Hyatt is the only hotel chain of the three main ones that doesn’t use a dynamic pricing model. That means Hilton and Marriott do use a dynamic pricing structure when it comes to how many points a given room will cost per night. Now how much a room costs in points is going to vary depending on where your destination is and the level of the brand in the Hilton hierarchy. A Waldorf Astoria (Hilton’s most luxurious brand) is going to cost you more points than your standard Hilton chain hotel in the same given city. In some cases, you may find a good deal, but in my experience, this is usually the case.
A good example is from the Japan trip that I am currently in the early stages of planning. In Tokyo, I’m looking to stay at the Conrad Tokyo which costs 130,000 points per night. You may be telling yourself “That’s a lot of points!” to which I’d say “You’re right!” But here’s where things get fun. With Hilton Silver status, you get the 5th night free on award stays. Now I also have a Free Night Award and hope to have a second by the time we start booking things for the trip. So, my plan at least for now would be to stay the first part of our trip at the Conrad Tokyo for 5 nights. I’ll use 2 FNAs to cover two of the nights and because it’s a 5 night stay the 5th night is free, meaning I only need to use points for 2 of the nights. Currently, I have about 589,000 Hilton points which will easily cover the 260,000 points for those 2 nights and leave us with a good chunk of points to cover part of the second half of the trip when we return to Tokyo. We’ll see how many points I end up with when I’m able to start booking everything, but it’s exciting to think that we’d be able to stay in Tokyo for 5 nights and not pay a cent. And if I play my cards right, pun intended, I might have enough points to make all our hotel stays in Japan free. So be sure to follow my Japan on Points series, as I give updates on our progress and strategies for different parts of the trip.
Conclusion
All in all, Hilton has been a very good brand to me! I find it pretty easy to earn points that have already saved me a lot of money on my travels with my wife and our friends. Are there points worth the most? No, but if you’re able to amass a large amount of points you’ll be able to book some pretty nice stays. And even if you don’t have enough to cover a stay in full, you can still use your points to discount the cost of your trip. I’ve definitely done that a number of times over the years as well. It makes travel, especially international travel seem much more attainable. And the cool thing is that you’re earning the points off of money that you were going to be spending anyways. I think that’s a good place to end for now, I’ll look to talk more about Hilton in the future for sure, but also don’t want to completely overload your brain, if I haven’t already!
