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For the past month Hilton has been offering a bonus of up to 80% when you buy Honors Points in its latest sale and, if you haven’t taken advantage of this so far, today is your last chance to do so.
You can buy Hilton Honors Points via this link
Hilton’s Headline T&Cs
These are the more important terms and conditions you’ll need to know but, if you want to read them all, follow the link to the offer page after you log in and scroll to the bottom:
- The promotion runs through 11:59pm ET on 29 December 2017 (TODAY)
- Hilton Honors members may purchase a maximum of 80,000 points in this promotion
- Hilton Honors members may purchase a maximum of 80,000 points in a calendar year excluding bonuses.
- Hilton’s points sales are processed by Points.com so there’s no scope to earn credit card category bonuses awarded for hotel/travel spend.
The promotion is tiered and looks like this:
- Buy 0 – 9,000 Hilton Honors Points and get a 0% bonus
- Buy 10,000 – 19,000 Hilton Honors Points and get a 60% bonus
- Buy 20,000 – 80,000 Hilton Honors Points and get an 80% bonus
Doing The Math
Unlike the promotions we often see from the likes of IHG and United, in Hilton’s points sale the cost per point remains constant within each tier. This means that you can purchase 20,000 or 80,000 Hilton Honors points and you’ll still pay the same price per point.
Here’s the math showing just that:
If you were to buy 20,000 Honors points you would end up with 36,000 points (after the 80% bonus is added on) at a total cost of $200:
That works out to a cost of approximately 0.56 cents/point.
If you were to buy the full 80,000 allowance that would see you net 144,000 Hilton Honors points at a total cost of $800:
And, yet again, that works out to a cost of approximately 0.56 cents/point.
Note: If you decide to buy between 10,000 and 19,000 points you will be 0.625 cents/point – that;s expensive and unlikely to provide good value.
Should You Buy Points ?
We saw a sale where points were on offer at 0.5 cents each back in September/October so this isn’t the cheapest rate we’ve seen this year (and that’s definitely worth bearing in mind), but if you happen need points now, can you get value?
Yes….definitely.
Let’s take the Conrad Miami as an example.
Picking a random date in February the Conrad Miami can be booked for $449 + taxes or 70,000 Hilton points:
$449 + taxes comes to a total cost for the night of $507.48:
If you buy the 70,000 points needed to book this room in the current promotion they’ll cost you approximately $392.
Buying points in this promotion would save you over $115/night on a reservation like this one AND you would be getting a flexible reservation as opposed to the very inflexible reservation you get with the lowest cash rate.
Buy Hilton Points via this link
Bottom Line
With promotions like this one you always need to bear in mind that the maximum number of points you can purchase (in this case 80,000 excluding bonuses) and realise that you’re not going to be able to buy a lot of cheap nights with this promotion alone…..but you can still save a lot of money on individual nights.
The most important thing to do is to….
- Work out what you’d like to do with your points, where you’d like to visit and when
- Perform similar calculations to the one I’ve shown above.
If the math works for you then buying points in this promotion will clearly save you some money and you’re safe to buy as many points as you need (or are allowed to buy)…..but don’t try to persuade yourself that it’s ok to stock up on points in the math isn’t working out.
If you only need a few more thousand points (to add to your existing balance) to be able to redeem an award you’ve been thinking about, then paying a little more for the points than you would otherwise be happy to pay would also be ok….just don’t go overboard.
You can access the latest Hilton Points Promotion via this link.
