Booking aspirational Hilton properties can often be a very good use for Hilton Honors points and free night certificates (FNC). However, a consistently-noted problem is that it can be very difficult to find standard room award availability at high-demand locations (premium room awards are much higher-priced and can’t be booked with FNC). There are now several award search tools that can be quite helpful when looking for lodging on points, but Hilton also provides an easy-to-use flexible date calendar on its own website that allows you to scan months of award availability in a few seconds.
We periodically come across comments from folks who are unfamiliar with accessing the calendar, or who don’t know that it even exists. In this post, we’ll give a quick “how-to” tutorial to an easy way to look at Hilton awards a month at a time.
How to use Hilton’s flexible date calendar
If you want to quickly find standard award availability at any particular Hilton property, simply type the property (or a city) into the search box at the Hilton home page and, when entering dates, check the “My dates are flexible” box.
Then, under “Special Rates”, make sure you have “Use points” checked.
After you hit search, you’ll see the hotel(s) in the search results with a button that says “view available dates”.
Clicking that button will bring you to a calendar that allows you to advance forward or move backward by month. In this case, we had searched for a single-night stay. The nice thing is that you can then see by the pricing which dates a “standard room reward” is available.
In this case, you can quickly see that there are several available nights in August but no 5-night stretches where you can take advantage of a Hilton’s 5th night free on standard reward nights…which is very helpful when you’re plunking down 120k points per night.
If you were specifically looking for five night of consecutive availability, you could search for a 5-night stay and then advance through the months looking for a time when it’s available.
It should be noted that some recent Small Luxury Hotels (SLH) properties don’t seem to be playing well with the calendar. We imagine that’s going those will be smoothed out eventually.
Bottom Line
The flexible date calendar has been around on the Hilton site for a long time. This isn’t something that’s unique to Hilton, but if you were unaware of those check boxes the process of finding award availability at high-demand properties like the Conrad Bora Bora can be quite tedious. Thankfully, the calendar is usually accurate and can help you quickly thumb through months at a time with just a few clicks of the mouse.
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Just a tip, there are sometimes different availability between 1 night versus multiple night stays. If I only searched for 1 night stay say at the grand wailea, I would’ve been discouraged because they had a few single nights at premium pricing but when I looked at 5 nights, I was able to book the block at the 110k points availability. This can make a difference when you’re booking. 5 night say and a free night stay To tack on
Does anyone know what the second number (the number next to the date) means on the booking calendar?
The second day of your stay
thanks for the tip
Thanks, useful to know. And it turns out to be simple, even better.
Can we get a post like this, showing how to show the monthly availability view, for all of the major hotel groups?
Thanks for the useful info!
Good tip, although I now know that I’ll never be able to book the Park City Waldorf-Astoria during the ski season. Only premium rooms are available and there aren’t nearly enough commas in my Hilton point balance to make it work.