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We received an interesting tip from reader Lauren yesterday giving us a heads up about a targeted Hilton offer that gives you bonus points on your next stay after doing a dummy booking. If you tend to do searches when not logged in to your Hilton account, you might be missing out.
The Deal
- Earn bonus points on your next stay with Hilton if targeted for an offer when doing a dummy booking.
Key Terms
- Must complete stay within 3 months of registration date.
Quick Thoughts
Lauren shared in her email that she was recently looking to book a Hilton stay, but ultimately decided not to complete the booking. At some point in the hours or days after that, she received an email from Hilton with the subject line “You forgot something (including a chance to win big)!”
That email listed the hotel she’d been looking at and its price, but the interesting part was beneath. There was the image you can see at the top of this post, inviting her to choose a suitcase to win a prize. She did that and subsequently received an email advising that she’d earn 3,000 bonus points on her next stay courtesy of that offer.
You can often buy 3,000 Hilton Honors points for $15 (when they go on sale for 0.5cpp), so her offer isn’t hugely lucrative. However, if you’re planning on booking a Hilton stay, it might be worth doing a dummy booking first and seeing if you’re targeted for a similar offer. Who knows – perhaps some people are offered an even larger number of bonus points.
There’s a couple of things to be aware of with this. The first is that in order to be targeted, you’ll need to be logged in to your account. I tend to do all my hotel searches in incognito mode; that way, when it comes time to book a stay I can then click through from a shopping portal and hopefully have it track without any issue. Doing that would mean I wouldn’t get targeted by Hilton because they wouldn’t be able to associate my search with my Hilton Honors account.
Something else to consider is that if you decide to do a dummy booking and wait a day or two in the hope that you get an offer from Hilton, the room rate for your stay could go up. A large enough increase could therefore potentially wipe out the value from any kind of bonus points offer you subsequently receive.
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Stephen, I don’t understand the point about incognito mode search. Did you post a more complete article on this topic?
If you do a bunch of searches in your browser, then later make a purchase, there’s a risk that there’ll be some kind of tracking cookies that could interfere with earning portal rewards (e.g. if you’re looking for a coupon code, most sites listing those codes will add their affiliate link so that they’ll earn commission if you make a purchase). By doing my research in incognito mode, I avoid that risk as I can then click through from a shopping portal in a regular browser window and have more confidence that it’ll track.
Thanks for the clarification, although I’ve seen some Reddit posts that question whether this is effective. No harm in trying, I guess!