Hilton’s partnership with Small Luxury Hotels of the World (SLH) has made Hilton points and free night certificates exciting again. There are numerous participating SLH hotels that are are drool-worthy destinations and which would be out of reach for most people when booking with cash. With Hilton points or free night certificates, though, they’re suddenly totally doable. The one big catch is that many of these properties are small and have very few standard rooms or suites that are bookable with free night certificates or for a reasonable number of Hilton points. Additionally, some of these properties require a minimum number of nights for a stay before any awards will show as available. Taken together, these issues mean that it can seem impossible to find award stays at some of these hotels and resorts. Fortunately, there’s an easy solution…
Side note: the solution presented below will also work for finding non-SLH hard to get hotel awards available through Hilton, Marriott, IHG, and Hyatt.
Overview
To-date, Hilton has added nearly 300 SLH properties to their program. When standard rooms are available, these hotels are bookable with Hilton points and/or Hilton free night certificates. Here are a couple of useful sites for finding these hotels:
Hilton offers both standard and premium room awards. Standard room awards are capped at no more than 150,000 points per night (and for the vast majority of hotels, the cap is much lower than that). Often it is possible to get very good value for your points when booking standard room awards. Premium room awards, meanwhile, have no caps and almost always offer very poor value for your points. Additionally, free night certificates can be applied only to standard room awards.
Many SLH properties are small. Hence the name “Small” Luxury Hotels of the World. Additionally, each hotel can presumably choose which rooms can be booked as standard rooms through Hilton. As a result, some SLH properties have very few standard rooms available at all and the chance of finding them available when you want to visit can be extremely low.
Another issue with trying to find award availability is that some hotels set a minimum number of nights required for some or all of their standard room bookings. So if you search for availability one night at a time, you’re simply not going to find it.
The Rooms.Aero Solution
An easy solution to finding SLH award availability is to use the free tool Rooms.Aero. This is from the same people who brought us Seats.Aero (a wonderfully nerdy tool for finding Unicorn flight awards). You don’t even have to create an account to use this tool.
Last week, I sent the Rooms.Aero developers a list of SLH properties that participate with Hilton Honors, and they added all of these properties to their tool. If you come across any that haven’t yet been loaded into the tool, Rooms.Aero makes it easy to add a property yourself (then wait a day or so for the data to populate).
Just like Seats.Aero (which is a tool for finding award flights), Rooms.Aero searches for award space in advance. When you use the tool, the information you see is cached from the last update that was run. As a result, the data isn’t necessarily 100% accurate since award nights may have been taken or released in the meantime. Still, this tool saves a ton of time for award searching!
Step 1: Click Hotels… Hilton Honors
The first thing you’ll want to do is to go to the Rooms.Aero Hilton hotels page. You can do that by clicking the Hotels menu and selecting Hilton Honors. Now you’re ready to search for the hotel you want.
Step 2: Search for Hotel by Name
In the search box, start typing the name of the hotel you’re interested in. It should appear well before you’re finished typing.
Once you find the hotel, click “Find rooms”.
If you can’t find the hotel, the top of the same page has instructions for how to add the hotel to the tool (it’s very easy to do!).
Step 3: Explore hotel availability
After clicking “Find rooms” you’ll enter a page for exploring room availability at the hotel. If you see text in a yellow shaded box, it’s worth reading. In the example shown here, Rooms.Aero points out that the hotel has more award availability for multi-night stays. And, above that box, it shows how many stays are available for single night stays, two night stays, and three night stays. To make things really easy, the tool has a drop-down selector to pick stays of up to 5 nights.
The other thing you’ll want to do is click on the Points drop down and filter to Points < 150K (I believe that really means “points less than or equal to 150K”). This will weed out the unwanted Premium Room award results that are available at some but not all SLH hotels.
Now, simply explore the results to see which dates are available! Once you find dates that look good, go to Hilton.com to search for the same dates to make sure the award space is really available.
Step 4: Book your stay
If you want to book the stay with Hilton points you can do so simply by logging into your Hilton account and booking online or through the Hilton app. To book with free night certificates, or a combination of points and certificates, you need to call Hilton or contact them via online chat.
If you can’t find the dates you want, set an alert
Rooms.aero lets you create an alert where they’ll email you if the dates you need become available.
Those who sign up for the Pro version of the sister tool Seats.Aero (our affiliate link) can also set up “Any date” alerts to be notified when new award space appears.
Conclusion
SLH Hotels provide an awesome new option for spending your Hilton points and free night certificates. However, finding available award nights at the most desirable hotels can be difficult. Luckily Rooms.aero makes it easy. And, unless you want “Any date” alerts, its 100% free. Additionally, you can use the same tool to find hard-to-get awards for non-SLH hotels too. Rooms.aero works with Hilton, Marriott, Hyatt, and IHG.
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The alert function is a fantastic tool. Used it to book the Conrad in downtown Indianapolis for the Taylor Swift concert at the standard room rack rate of 70,000 points before revenue management changed the price. Less than 24 hours later, the price had jumped to over a million points!
Great article, Greg! Very helpful.
Has anyone found a way to use free nights from multiple Hilton accounts if there is a 3 night minimum booking and each account has only 1 free night?
Calling should work, which you have to do anyway. I had a similar thing where I was booking multiple FNCs from one account to extend a stay where the FNCs wouldn’t meet the minimum by themselves and customer service had no problem doing it without contacting the property.
Thank you Troy. Will report back when I actually get all of my nights next month.
Great podcast episode as always. I just booked South Bank, Turks and Caicos for 4 nights. I was looking at Sailrock but with 3 people ( 12 yr old son ) there were no standard room rates. Do you guys have an additional info on South Bank? I can only find one review by Travel and Leisure and not much else. Understand it is very new. Thanks
The resort does not open until November. It does not sit directly on a natural beach, but has a manmade “island” and manmade “beach”. That said I have been keeping my eye on this property because I have kids as well, and the room type certainly caters for families. Definitely a unicorn in terms of value and I’m hoping it sticks around long enough for my families schedule to align and make a booking
I didn’t have any issues finding availability using Rooms.Aero thanks to FM. The cancellation policy is within a week of the booking so I wanted to book it before more bloggers etc are talking about it. Thanks for the feedback on the property.
Agreed. I feel it is a unicorn that has the potential to disappear if it garners too much attention. Though my initial response may come across negative towards the property, I am extremely excited at the potential to utilize Hilton points/FNCs for such a great value.
Yes we used FNCs and points. And had availability for the end of the school year in May 🙂
How many points did you use ?
I’ve stayed at both Sailrock and Point Grace.
Sailrock is nicer, yet very remote, which is what I like. I’d return to Sailrock when I return. Flights over were included with points when it was a Hyatt property. Enjoy
130,000 per night for South Bank. Might have to do Sailrock with just P2.