How Hilton Honors Points Save Money
After reading this, you will know how to use Hilton Honors Points and save money. We just made a reservation for a quick family vacation using Hilton Honors points and saved $900! We love staying in Hilton hotels for free. They have saved us lots of money over the last few years.
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What Are Hilton Honors Points?
Hilton Honors points are a loyalty program by Hilton. You can earn them by staying at Hilton Hotels, which we have done in the past when we worked for IBM. But nowadays we get them by travel hacking using credit cards. Every hotel in the Hilton portfolio can be booked using these points. We rarely pay for hotels, almost always use Hilton Honors points and get to stay for free. We have used them a lot in our travels all over the world, from Amsterdam to Singapore, from Rome to Hawaii. Hilton hotels are almost everywhere and who doesn’t love a free hotel stay!?
What is Travel Hacking?
If you don’t have a job where your company pays for your hotel, you have to get more creative. Enter travel hacking! The most popular travel hacks are applying for credit card with a sign up bonus and get a lot of points that way. Caveat: you need to have good credit and you need to have the means and the organizational skills to pay off your balance each month, because paying high interest on a balance is NOT worth it. In our case we mostly used an American Express Ascend card, awarding us many Hilton Honors points and free hotel stays.
The American Express Hilton Honors Ascend Card
This is our favorite card at the moment. With this card, you get complimentary Gold Status in the Hilton Honors program, which means that you get a free breakfast with your stay. It also means that you can book four reward nights and then get the fifth one free. (that’s what we did for today’s booking). You will earn 12x points for any transactions with Hilton, 6x at US restaurants, supermarkets, and gas stations and 3x on any other purchase. The points add up fast! If you travel regularly you can get a priority pass with 10 free airport lounge visits for the year. We love using those! Here is an overview of all the benefits.
The card has a $95 annual fee, so only apply if you feel that that is worth it. Especially the 150,000 points for the first year would be worth it, I think, but you should make your own decision based on your situation.
If you can spend $15,000 on it, you qualify for a free weekend night reward! We used one of our certificate for a free night in a Paris boutique hotel. This fall, we used another one to stay at the London NYC in Midtown Manhattan for free.
You can earn 125,000 Hilton Honors Bonus Points after you use your new Card to make $2,000 in purchases within the first 3 months of Card Membership.
If you want to apply for this card and get 125,000 Hilton Honors Points, I would love it if you use this link Sometimes this link might get you to the Aspire card instead, in that case click “Explore other cards” and you can select the Ascend card or any other card you are interested in.
Using Points
When you are ready to use your points, go to the Hilton website, sign in to your account. From then enter a search for a hotel and choose ‘Using Points’. You will get a list of possible hotels with the number of points needed. The redemption will be priced from a low of 10,000 points per night to a high of 90,000 for New York City hotels. The average seems to be between 30,000 to 50,000 a night if you are not in a majorly touristy area.
Because the Hilton Honors Ascend card will give you Gold status, you can also use the “pay 4 nights, get the 5th night free” when you book with points. When you are looking for a longer hotel stay, this will amount to even more savings than just from using points.
Side note: Do not overspend on your credit cards, but if you did anyway, here are the common errors to avoid when using a balance transfer to a 0 % card.
How Much Money Can You Save?
Every time we use points I tend to do a quick check on the hotel web site to see how much our room would have cost us. It always delights us when we see our room for an inane amount of money and know we did get it for free! Our fondest free hotel stays:
- Aleph Rome Hotels, Curio Collection. A very well situated hotel close to the Piazza Barberini. Ideally situated to explore Rome. During this hotel stay, we saved $2,000.
- Hilton Garden Inn in the center of New York City, taking four teenage girls to see a show on Broadway! We saved $900.
- Conrad Singapore, where I had miso soup for breakfast every morning! During our Singapore stay, we saved $1,600.
- Hilton at the Financial District in San Francisco. When we got stuck there for four night thanks to a snow storm back home. Enjoying an wesome view: we could see Alcatraz from our room. That time, we saved $1,000.
- Hilton The Hague, in an old post office building, very centrally located. Within an easy walking distance of the Mauritshuis where we saw the Goldfinch and the Girl with the Pearl Ear Ring. For this stay, we saved $600.
- Grand Wailea on Maui, Hawaii, where we could see whales from our balcony! And we went snorkeling nearby and could hear the whales sing. So amazing! Because this is a very expensive hotel, and we got upgraded, we saved $4,000.
- Quebec Hilton, where we based ourselves to see snow geese and to go on a whale watch! We saved $600.
As you can see, the list is endless, and we love exploring the world with our Hilton Honors points! Come and join us! Sign up NOW!
What has been your favorite hotel stay to date? Have you ever traveled for free? Share in the comments.
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Comments
37 responses to “How To Use Hilton Honors Points 2023”
Thanks for sharing, I love finding credit cards with awesome travel points. What’s your favorite part about staying at the Hilton hotels?
Thank you. I like that they pay attention to what we as a traveller want and need and they are serious about their commitment to making the customer happy. We have called them on some issues a few times and every single time we were happy with the way they resolved our complaint .
Usually we don’t have any complaints though 🙂
Great idea for travelers. I have not invested much time into points on my cards. Great idea!
THanks Holly! Yes, look into rewards cards. THere are so many available nowadays, from cash back to travel rewards and they all have their pros and cons. If you do use a credit card, it makes sense to find one that fits your life style. Good luck!
There is tons of information out there and it can really pay off if you learn to hack the points game.
Thanks for sharing! Now I’ll consider using Hilton to save, plus their hotels look gorgeous and so so clean.
You are welcome, Sam! I always thought Hilton would be out of my reach, so I was very happy to discover this travel hack to get ‘free’ points.
And I too love their hotels!
Happy travels!
Thanks for sharing! I need to be better at this. We only have Southwest rewards but that won’t take us overseas!
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