A reader reached out to us recently regarding a tool they’ve created to help people redeem their Hilton Aspire resort credit. The website they’ve created is called HigherAspire.com and it could definitely be a useful tool in finding properties with low – or low enough – nightly rates.
HigherAspire.com reminds me of MaxFHR, a tool which helps people redeem their $200 Amex Platinum Fine Hotels + Resorts credit by sorting eligible properties in order of lowest cost. Higher Aspire does something similar, sorting Hilton resorts from cheapest to most expensive.
The reason this could be useful is because the Hilton Aspire card comes with a twice-annual $200 credit that can be redeemed at eligible Hilton resort properties; $200 from January-June and another $200 from July-December. If you’d like to redeem the credit to pay for a stay, the Higher Aspire website can help you identify properties charging $200 or less for a night. In many cases, the credit could cover 2-3 nights.
The way the site works is straightforward. It lists all the eligible Hilton Resorts properties and sorts them by the lowest cash rate available in the booking calendar. At the time of writing this post, rates range from $56 per night to $2,114 per night. That’s not to say that every night is available at the rate displayed; rather, that’s the lowest rate available at some point in the booking calendar.
At the moment, the site has limited functionality in terms of sorting and filtering. You can enter a date range which is helpful if you have fixed dates on which you can take a vacation. There’s also a Map page if you have a general idea of which country or continent you want to visit and want to see which properties are there. For what it’s worth, Hilton’s own website lists eligible resorts by country and region.
One improvement that I’ve suggested to the site’s creator is that it would be helpful to have the ability to filter by country on the site’s home page. The map page lets you view locations and you can click on the pinned locations to see which properties are there, but that page doesn’t give any indication as to price. It would therefore be helpful on the home page to be able to have a search box where you could enter something like ‘Spain’ to have it only display Spanish properties. That would then also make it easy to see their prices at a glance. An existing workaround is to use the Ctrl + F function in your browser to search for any given country, but a search box that filters solely for a country and/or region would be even more handy.
Don’t forget that you can also redeem the Hilton Aspire resort credit for charges to your room; not only on room rates. That means that if you book a stay at an eligible property using Hilton Honors points or free night certificates, you can still redeem the $200 credit towards things like food, drink, spa treatments, activities, etc.
Your Suggestions
Is there any other functionality you’d like to see on HigherAspire.com to make it easier to find properties at which you can redeem your Hilton Aspire credit? Share your ideas in the comments below.
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What a great person to create such a useful tool for us!
This seems useful for the Amex Biz Plat Hilton credits, too, no?
It’s not as useful for that because those $50 credits can be redeemed at any Hilton property; it’s not limited to this select list of Aspire resorts.
Thanks, Stephen!
I had been holding out hope that the hilton gift cards were coming back, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. 🙁
?
yes
Good article. I’m not a Hilton guy but this got me to thinking about other things. Thanks.
Yeah, this map is really slick. [I retract my not ready for primetime comment earlier – though I’m strictly talking about the map function] 😎
I see the (mystery?) author added Rome on the map!
Maybe an improvement to the map could be making the pins that are too close together – and that look as one, zoomed out,- a different color. That way, one would know to zoom in further.
Some examples being:
LXR Bodrum / Doubletree Bodrum – which are basically next to each other.
another being
Keight Hotel and Hotel Rijeka in Croatia
Tulum – Hilton and Conrad
also Aruba.
So if one is at a (Pre-defined) certain zoom level and they click on a pin – and for example a Doubletree comes up – one might say, I don’t want to go to a DT, and you look elsewhere. But in reality there may be another brand (As above).
This is kind of nit-picky….so certainly wouldn’t make it high priority. Or even medium. Maybe this would confuse things as well?
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The missing Germany one is: Hilton Frankfurt Gravenbruch.
Don’t ever recall seeing that before until recently.
I assume the map is manually updated as opposed to automatically scraping the Hilton resort credit eligible hotel list? [That would be some more fancy coding].
Used my resort credit at a different place every year – Japan-Okinawa, France, US-Florida, Turkey and have looked at numerous others. Maybe China next year, though strongly considered Morocco or Egypt. And have stayed a couple of others – Greece, Mexico (Not using credit – but on list)…
One thing is obvious from the map though – there’s nothing in South America (Except for coast of Colombia — which I had a booking for before, but canceled)
Very helpful! Thanks for creating and sharing.
Would be good to know where standard award nights are available for those of us who like to combine the certificates with the resort credits (and the Surpass $50) for a long stay.
This will be handy – we are in two soon three Aspire mode since the card refresh changes.
The third Aspire we will end up with $600 in RC – so we can either book a 2-3 night FNC – and use the $600/$1,200 on a reasonable/discounted Resort property stay(s).
We have actually already done this several times both pre/post card refresh.
We lucked out with both getting to double-dip the $250 Resort credit in 2023 as our renewal date fell between refresh and 12.31.2023 (we booked two nights at RW LV Hilton for P2s Bday). We P2s 1st resort credit for 2024 for a dinner at Caversteak chatged to the room. We used mine on two nights in Fiji in March 2024.
I accidentally/unintentionally used my 2nd half of 2024 Resort Credit when booking Park City DoubleTree “Experince the Stay” they charged the full stay deposit up front similar to RW LV.
It was unexpected but really worked out for the best as we had the full $400 (P1/P2) to use at WA Park City in January 2025. (We also have Amex Biz and two Surpasses with credits we have to use.
We used P2 2nd 2024 RC at WA Versailles last October.
We are using our 2nd 2025 RC on several nights at Embassy Suites by Hilton Scottsdale Resort.
We booked the new SLH Malliouhana Resort, Anguilla with FNC for Jan 2025 and booked a single night at Zemi Beach House where we will use our RC and any other credits.
I have been on the fence about adding 4th Aspire ($1,600 in RC, $800 in Airline credits).
Primarily because we already have 11 FNA/FNC and a variety of Hotel credits ($200 Amex FHR credits, Quest $150 Renowned, $200 Delta Stays Biz Plat credit, $100 UA Biz Hotel Credits, etc, etc). It takes a lot of work to track and make sure we use the credits so far, as they add an extra variable to search and consider on ebery location we habe plans for visit (some easier than others).
Plus the New Chase/InstaCredits free money but one more thing to track.
But this will definitely make life when considerimg the Resort Credit on stays (much smaller footprint -so definitely easier and will make.it far quicker).
YOU LOST ME Yoni
To understand Yoni’s comment, one needs to understand the various benefits of the Aspire card, which include:
– Free Night Certificate (upon card anniversary)
– $400 resort credit ($200 semi-annually)
– $200 flight credit ($50 quarterly)
If one gets the card on (say) November 15th of Year 1, during the first card year, the person will see:
– $200 resort credit in Year 1 – November 15 to December 31
– $200 resort credit in Year 2 – January 1 – June 30
– $200 resort credit in Year 2 – July 1 – December 31
That’s an extra $200 in the first year of the card.
Something similar happens with the flight credit and it works out to $250 during the first card year.
Yoni then throws in credits from other cards. Not that any additional complexity was needed.
Put in the time to study the cards. The information is on the card issuer websites. Good luck.
Thanks! @Fred – my neuro-divergent brain almost needs a ChatGPT to interpret – most people are TLDR – but I share mainly for others wired like me.
How did you like your stay at SLH Malliouhana Resort and Zemi Beach or did you mean you are going to Anguilla in Jan 2026? I’d like to go to these Anguilla resorts as well in Jan/Feb. We have 5 FNCs to use by the end of September. We don’t want to go to the Caribbean during hurricane season so we are now leaning toward the Hilton Stucky in Venice, Italy. It’s the shoulder season then so the crowds will not be as bad as the Summer crowds.
Yes your correct 2026 not 2025 – I agree about the Hurricane season (all though we are gambling on 5 nights in New Orleans in September).
I orginally booked three nights at the Zemi with FNC/pts and stumbled on the Malliouhana Resort when I was looking for properties at St Maarteen and then switched it up and splitting it up with only 1N at Zemi the Malliouhana Resort is 150K HH and almost $2K with taxes for the standard reward we booked. This way we can still use the $400~$600 in Resort credits at Zemi.
This will actually be our first trip to the Caribbean – but even when we do Mexican beaches we still visit in the winter. We need the cheery sun to spark hope and life into our souls.
The PNW has amazing beautiful low humidity summers ☀️ but we pay for it with 5-6 months of gray, dreary, soul sucking, drizzling misty rain. Even Alaska in winter with 18-22 hours of darkness is not as depressing as the PNW west of the high desert.
You made me laugh about the PNW dreary winters. Until recently, we lived in northern Vermont so have traveled to many of the lesser traveled Caribbean islands including Nevis, Tortola, and Saba. Haven’t been to Anguilla yet. It’s on my wish list
I’ll take an NE seaboard winter over the PNW dreary winters – it may be bitter cold and may have snow on the ground but you get sunny days and the snow makes it bright even at night. I went to school at Stony Brook and my family roots hail back to the Mayflower and up to the Canadian Maritime region.
The Caribbean is harder for us it’s a red-eye to MIA. I was hoping to really use the SW companion pass to visit all the locations they serve. AA seems to be better for much of the Caribbean and West Indies. 10K PDX to SXM/AXA 1w per person and MIA to PDX 7.5K AA miles direct.
But PDX/SEA are great for EU (KEF Iceland) is a 7 hr daytime flight – you land 10PM PST but it 6/7AM local time. Same with AMS on KLM 9 hour daytime flight arrive 9/10AM local time – I can do 9 hours in coach (its easier than a 8-9hr biz red-eye because you loose about 4 hours with dinner/breakfast and cabin prep for landing. But 20K AF miles PDX-AMS and 25~30K to other KLM partners. Granted not as good as some of the killer deals from the Eastern Seaboard – but because of the great circle flying times are not much longer for us ( we are further north than Toronto, Canada).
Asia is also easy enough with SFO/SEA/SLC/PDX and even DEN. But we tend to fly Polaris out of SFO we did almost 17 hours in the air SFO-SIN in 2023 my longest single flight. SFO-MNL (Manila) is about 15 the UA non-stop red-eye is perfect for adjusting to jet-lag. Hawa’ii is also only a 5ish hour direct flight. HNL is also a good for getting to Bora-Bora/Tahiti on miles – we are planning a trip one of these years – with some FNC – its just further down the bucket-list – I was actually planning this then saw a post about Zemi and AA miles for cheap flights (7-10K) and I had been sitting on about 85K AA miles for about 5 years had booked Costa Rica for Jan 2021 for the but they changed the C19 testing requirements for US citizens two weeks before our trip (before phone proctored C19 test were available).
So now its turned in to a 2 week trip, with Miami, the Keys, Orlando and a few other spots I’m working on.
We are doing 18 days this fall (foliage and visiting family I haven’t seen in decades) Berkshires, Providence,Plymouth, Boston, Maine, NH, Vermont, Quebec City (iconic Fairmont La Chateau Frontenac -booked gold room with Amex Plat FHR).
I digress – But PVD (Providence has the cheapest car rentals of any airports around Boston, MHT and a few others. I also ordered a MassPASS $20 for the tolls in the rental car (its the cheapest Toll pass of the the surrounding states with no funky monthly fees or other fees). I can also use it along I-95 to Florida -IIRC I can also use it for tolls in the Sunshine state. I also put a Google calendar reminder to take the transponder out of the rental. PVD airport also has Hyatt Place for cheap stay using URs its also walking distance to the rental cars and terminal (Plus an Escape Lounge and a PP Experience ($28 F&B credit – for those with US Bank AR card which still offers 8 * $28 visits per card year) at the PVD Provisions Kitchen & Bar.
So hopefully this may inspire or help someone heading to any of these locations – It was a post like this lead me to using our FNC at Malliouhana Resort and Zemi house on Anguilla.
Seems to be missing some properties. Rome Cavalieri is an Aspire property for example. Pretty sure there’s a property or two in UK. And in Germany. Missing LXR Bodrum on map (SHows up if you search on the tiles) – I stayed there before. Not ready for primetime….I’ll stick to the Hilton website for now.
I haven’t checked to ensure every property is on there. I was surprised to see no properties in the UK and so did double check that against Hilton’s list – sure enough, there are no resort-eligible properties in the UK sadly.
there used to be one in Scotland.
Looking at the list now — yes it’s gone. Good find.
I zoomed further on the map – and found the LXR Bodrum on the map. It’s hidden behind another pin.
The Rome Cavalieri is definitely missing though on the map and tiles. Maybe this is just a manual input error / oversight?
There’s also a property in Germany missing.
I think it’s pretty new…so maybe that’s why it’s not on the map.
Maybe somewhere should be noted – checked with the Aspire list as of _______. Or a simple count by REGION…that matches the # of entries on the Aspire page – sorting by REGIONS.
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The map is many times better then the Hilton map though — which is sluggish.And is just “Hilton Resorts” which isn’t necessarily Aspire credit eligible. So kudos to the author of this tool.
map doesn’t work when you scroll to the left. Or too far to the right. A bit off of an implementation
Map seems better then one on Hilton website — which is almost unusable on small screens. Also slow to load on Hilton website.