Is it still worth collecting Hilton points on stays?

Now that Hilton points are worth far less than they once were, a reader emailed us this week to ask the following:

With Hilton points now devalued to a 0.35 cents per point Reasonable Redemption Value, is it time to stop accumulating Hilton points altogether, and book all Hilton rooms through Rove? I don’t mean Loyalty Eligible Stays, I mean just pure Rove points. Can accumulating more Hilton points through stays or transfers ever pay off now?

As is often the case with questions like this in the points and miles world, the answer is: it depends.

The reason I say it depends is because there are all kinds of factors that can come into play when making a determination as to what approach will work best for you.

Your Hilton points & Rove Miles valuations

For the calculations I’ll be doing in this post, I’ll be using our Reasonable Redemption Values for Hilton and Rove of 0.35 cents per point and 1.4 cents per point (cpp) respectively.

When deciding what kind of approach you’ll be taking, it’ll be important to calculate earnings based on your (realistic) points valuations. If you choose to only redeem Hilton points when getting, say, 0.5 or 0.6 cpp of value, use that figure. If you cherry pick award bookings when transferring your Rove Miles to airline partners and/or wait until there are transfer bonuses, perhaps you’d pick a 2 cpp valuation.

Hilton earnings baseline

When booking stays directly with Hilton, you earn 10 points per dollar at nearly all their brands; the exceptions are Home2 Suites, Homewood Suites, Spark, Tru, and Apartment Collection that all earn 5 points per dollar and LivSmart Studios which earns 3 points per dollar.

Based on a 0.35 cpp value, with most Hilton brands your return on spend will be 3.5%.

Do you have Hilton elite status?

If you have elite status in the Hilton Honors program, you earn bonus points on base spend depending on your status level:

• Silver – 20%
• Gold – 80%
• Diamond – 100%
• Diamond Reserve – 120%

As a result, on paid stays booked directly with Hilton, the value of the additional bonus points earned from having status is as follows (based on a 10X base earning rate for most Hilton brands):

• Silver – 0.7%
• Gold – 2.8%
• Diamond – 3.5%
• Diamond Reserve – 4.2%

Do you have a Hilton credit card?

Hilton awards bonus points when paying for stays with a Hilton credit card. There are four different Hilton credit cards; here are their earning rates when using them to pay for Hilton stays:

• Hilton Honors American Express Card (no annual fee) – 7X
• Hilton Honors American Express Surpass® Card – 12X
• Hilton Honors American Express Business Card – 12X
• Hilton Honors American Express Aspire Card – 14X

Based on a 0.35 cpp points valuation, here’s what those additional bonus points would be worth:

• Hilton Honors American Express Card (no annual fee) – 2.45%
• Hilton Honors American Express Surpass® Card – 4.2%
• Hilton Honors American Express Business Card – 4.2%
• Hilton Honors American Express Aspire Card – 4.9%

Something to remember is that each of the Hilton credit cards offer elite status of some variety. That can therefore ensure you earn those extra bonus points from the previous elite status section, even if you’re not staying at Hilton properties enough to earn status organically.

Total Hilton points earnings depending on situation

Based on those previous valuations, here are some of the overall earning rates you could expect to get based on a variety of situations:

No elite status & no credit card

• 10X base earnings – 3.5%

Elite status but no credit card

• 10X base earnings + Silver bonus – 4.2%
• 10X base earnings + Gold bonus – 6.3%
• 10X base earnings + Diamond bonus – 7%
• 10X base earnings + Diamond Reserve bonus – 7.7%

Elite status + credit card

• 10X base earnings + Silver bonus + no annual fee Hilton credit card – 6.65%
• 10X base earnings + Gold bonus + Hilton Surpass or Business credit card – 10.5%
• 10X base earnings + Diamond bonus + Hilton Surpass or Business credit card – 11.2%
• 10X base earnings + Diamond bonus + Hilton Aspire card – 11.9%
• 10X base earnings + Diamond Reserve bonus + Hilton Aspire card – 12.6%

Other earning/benefit factors for directly booked Hilton stays

In addition to the points you’ll earn on paid stays based on the base earnings, points from elite status, and points from Hilton credit cards, there are other ways that you could earn points or other rewards on your stay, as well as other benefits you could receive.

Promotions

Hilton frequently runs promotions when staying with them. In the past, we often saw double or triple base points promotions which meant earning an additional 10 or 20 points per dollar respectively. That would be an additional 3.5% or 7% return respectively, but sadly those kinds of promos are far less common nowadays. More commonly we now see promos that are generally far less rewarding, such as 2,000 bonus points per stay—not even per night.

MyWay benefits

Depending on your elite status level, Hilton lets you preselect the welcome benefits and amenities you receive when staying at certain brands. Sometimes that’s a food and beverage credit, other times it’s three in-room snacks and beverages, and other times it’s simply a bottle of water and a snack.

With many brands, you can receive bonus points when checking in which are awarded on a per stay basis rather than being earned per night. The points include 100 bonus points at Home2 Suites, 250 bonus points at brands like Hampton, 750 bonus points at brands like Hilton Garden Inn, 1,000 bonus points at brands like DoubleTree, Hilton, and Conrad, and 2,000 points at brands like Apartment Collection.

Incidentals

If you book directly with Hilton and subsequently charge incidentals to your room—meals, drinks, parking, pet fees, spa treatments, etc.—you’ll earn points for that spending. You’ll earn base points, bonus points if you have elite status, and bonus points if paying for your stay with a Hilton card.

Amex Offers

Although it’s not points earning-related, we sometimes see Hilton Amex Offers such as ‘Spend $250 at Hilton properties and get $50 back as a statement credit.’ If booking a prepaid rate through an Online Travel Agency (OTA), you wouldn’t be able to use the Amex Offer as the payment wouldn’t be processed by the hotel. If you book directly though, you would be able to save money from that Amex Offer statement credit.

An important thing to be aware of with Hilton Amex Offers is that Advance Purchase rates aren’t eligible; you have to book a rate where the hotel—rather than Hilton itself—processes the payment for your stay.

Hilton credits

Several Amex Hilton cards, as well as the American Express Platinum Card® and The Business Platinum Card® have quarterly or twice-yearly credits you can redeem for stays at some or all Hilton properties (depending on the nature of the credit).

If you book a prepaid rate through an OTA, the payment won’t trigger those credits, although you could use the card for incidentals during your stay. Booking directly though will ensure you can earn those credits provided you book a rate where you pay at the hotel.

Shopping portal rewards

When booking a paid Hilton stay that you’ll be booking directly, it’s worth first clicking through from a shopping portal to earn additional rewards.

Hilton isn’t found on as many shopping portals as many retailers, but there are several options. I’d also recommend clicking around on the Hilton website with the Capital One Shopping browser extension installed. You’ll hopefully subsequently receive targeted emails offering elevated rates; I often get 10% or 14% cashback offers.

Keep an eye on shopping portal terms for Hilton. Some portals only offer rewards if you don’t have any elite status with Hilton, while others might provide tiered rewards percentages based on your Hilton elite status level.

Elite night credits & Milestone Rewards

If you’re looking to earn Hilton elite status by staying enough nights with them each year, you’ll need to book directly rather than via an Online Travel Agency like Rove (unless you’re booking a Loyalty Eligible stay; more about that later).

Depending on how many nights you’ll be staying with Hilton each year, you might need to also take into account forgone Milestone Rewards when not booking directly. Hilton awards 10,000 bonus points when you stay 40 nights with them in a calendar year, then an additional 10,000 bonus points for every additional 10 nights you stay, with a one-time bonus of 30,000 bonus points awarded at the 60 night level.

Complimentary breakfast or food & beverage credit

Hilton Honors members who have Gold status or higher get a food and beverage credit for stays in the US or complimentary breakfast during stays in other countries. Elite status benefits like this aren’t received unless booking directly, so the cost of missing out on that will need to be accounted for. That total could mount up if you stay with Hilton a lot, particularly if you travel with someone else who’d also otherwise be eligible for a food and beverage credit or free breakfast.

The value of free breakfast will also depend on which Hilton brand(s) you stay at. If you tend to stay at brands that offer complimentary breakfast for all guests regardless of status like Hampton, Tru, Home2 Suites, and Homewood Suites, you won’t have to worry about those forgone meals if booking through Rove or another OTA.

Room upgrades

It’s hard to put a tangible value on room upgrades, especially seeing as Hilton doesn’t offer an upgrade guarantee, plus more than 3/4 of their properties don’t have to give elite status members an upgrade in the first place.

Still, if the ability to have a chance of getting an upgrade is important to you, that’ll have to be considered when choosing whether or not to book directly with Hilton.

Lounge access

Those with Hilton Honors Diamond elite status are eligible for lounge access if the hotel has one (and provided it’s not designated as a Diamond Reserve ‘Premium Club’ lounge).

If booking a Hilton stay via an OTA and you have Diamond status, you won’t gain access to the lounge unless paying far more for a room that does provide lounge access. If you don’t tend to utilize lounge facilities that much then it might not be much of a consideration. However, if the lounge provides a generous array of drinks and food in the evening and you’d like to benefit from that, booking directly is the way to go.

An alternative: Rove

OK, so those are all the factors to take into account when calculating how rewarding it would be to book stays with Hilton directly, but what about your other options?

In the reader’s question, they specifically asked about Rove and so I’ll focus on their travel portal for now. As a reminder, Rove (our referral link) has its own transferable currency called Rove Miles. They have a shopping portal that awards Rove Miles, as well as a travel portal where you can book hotels and flights and be rewarded with Rove Miles. When booking flights, you’ll also earn the airline’s miles/points.

When booking hotel stays, you won’t also earn the hotel’s points unless you book what Rove refers to as a ‘Loyalty Eligible’ stay. With Loyalty Eligible stays, you earn both Rove Miles and the hotel chain’s points, elite night credits in the hotel’s loyalty program, plus you’ll be eligible to receive elite status benefits if you have status with the hotel chain.

Non-Loyalty Eligible stays

The reader specifically mentioned purely earning Rove Miles as an alternative, not booking Loyalty Eligible stays, so we’ll address that first.

The number of Miles that Rove awards for hotel bookings varies from property to property, so it’s hard to give an exact value like you can with direct Hilton bookings.

For example, when doing a search for properties in New York City and that general area, earning rates mostly ranged from 5X-12X.

I saw similar earning rates in other areas too, but sometimes you’ll come across some notable outliers. For example, this Hilton Vacation Club property in Virginia Beach would earn 28X miles on the dates I searched.

There are sometimes outliers at the low end too, such as this hotel in London that’d earn only 1 Rove Mile per dollar.

With earning rates ranging from 1X to 28X (or higher), it’s tricky ascribing a value to booking stays through Rove. If we assume a value of 1.4 cpp (our Reasonable Redemption Value for Rove), you could expect to get the following rewards value:

• 1X – 1.4%
• 3X – 4.2%
• 5X – 7%
• 6X – 8.4%
• 7X – 9.8%
• 8X – 11.2%
• 9X – 12.6%
• 10X – 14%
• 11X – 15.4%
• 12X – 16.8%
• 28X – 39.2%

Needless to say, if you find something like a 28X rate on Rove, that’ll beat out any kind of earning potential you’ll have when booking directly.

As mentioned earlier though, that’s not the only factor if you have elite status. Earning 28X is all well and good, but if it means forgoing free breakfast, room upgrades, the ability to earn statement credits from Hilton credits and/or Amex Offers, that could come at a cost.

Loyalty Eligible stays

The previous section calculated potential rewards based on only collecting Rove Miles. Rove is different to most other OTAs though because at some hotels they offer a ‘Loyalty Eligible’ option.

In those situations, if you book a Loyalty Eligible you’ll earn both Rove Miles and Hilton Honors points. Not only that, but you’ll be able to receive elite status benefits during your stay, you’ll earn elite night credits towards status and Milestone Rewards, and more. Having this be a ‘both/and’ option means that you don’t have to choose between one or the other—you get the best of both worlds.

You might have noticed in the previous section that all of the screenshots of prices for Hilton properties in New York, Virginia Beach, and London all had a ‘Hilton Honors Eligible’ banner below them. I hadn’t tried filtering for Loyalty Eligible stays; it just so happened that all of those hotels were indeed eligible.

With Loyalty Eligible bookings, one thing that you would be forgoing is the ability to earn shopping portal rewards. However, in many cases the rewards you’ll earn from Rove will exceed the rewards you’ll earn from a shopping portal, especially if you have Hilton elite status as elite members often have shopping portal earnings reduced or restricted for Hilton stays.

What you wouldn’t be forgoing with a Loyalty Eligible stay is the ability to earn bonus points by paying with a Hilton credit card. Since November 2025, the Merchant of Record is the hotel rather than Rove. That means that if you book a Loyalty Eligible property through Rove and pay with a Hilton credit card, you’ll earn 7X-14X (depending on which card you pay with), plus it’ll trigger things like quarterly credits, resort credits on the Aspire card (at eligible properties), etc. That’s awesome and makes bookings through Rove far more compelling as there’s very little downside with choosing this option from a rewards perspective.

However…

Check the price when booking via Rove vs booking directly

All else being equal, booking a Loyalty Eligible stay through Rove makes the most sense seeing as you can stack both Rove and Hilton Honors earnings.

Things aren’t always equal though. For example, I checked pricing for an upcoming stay I’m planning to book for the Hilton Woking. The headline rate on Rove was only $105.84 per night:

That appears to compare very favorably to the rate when booking directly which, on the face of it, seems to be $33 per night more expensive:

However, that doesn’t tell the whole story. You might’ve noticed the Rove total is $307.30, so almost $50 per night is being added in taxes and fees for some reason. That nightly rate is therefore $153.65.

That $139 nightly rate when booking directly with Hilton is the rate including taxes and fees. As a result, booking directly with Hilton saves ~$15 per night over the Rove rate, or $30 for our two night stay.

That makes booking through Rove a poor choice for this specific situation. The Rove earnings would be 10X, so 14% back in rewards assuming a 1.4 cpp value. I have Hilton Diamond status and would be paying with an Aspire card, so with a 0.35 cpp value for Hilton points, I’d be getting 11.9% back in rewards. That’s 2.1% less than booking via Rove, but I’d be saving $30 compared to the Rove rate.

Even if it were a Loyalty Eligible rate (which it isn’t), I personally wouldn’t choose to pay an extra $30 in order to earn ~2,116 Rove Miles.

Other Rove rewards

When calculating the value you can get by booking hotel stays through Rove, there are a couple of other factors to account for.

Limited time promotions

Rove sometimes runs promos that reward you when booking your first stay through their travel portal. If one of those is running when you need to book a hotel stay and you’ve never booked via Rove before, those bonus Miles could tilt making a reservation through the Rove portal in their favor.

Credit card rewards

I mentioned earlier that Loyalty Eligible bookings have the Merchant of Record as the hotel chain rather than Rove.

That’s not the case for non-Loyalty Eligible stays. I believe Rove bookings code as Hotels and/or Travel, so it’s worth paying for those types of stays with a credit card that bonuses those general categories. The value of those rewards should then be accounted for in your calculations if your alternative would be to book directly with Hilton and pay with a Hilton credit card.

Hilton points balance vs Rove points balance

Another factor to take into account is how many points you have in your Hilton Honors and Rove accounts.

If you have 500,000 Hilton points already and only a few thousand Rove Miles, it might make more sense to collect Rove Miles even if the value of the miles you’d earn would be slightly less than the value of the Hilton points seeing as you already have a healthy stash of those.

The reverse could be true too. If you’ve managed to rack up a ton of Rove Miles through travel portal and/or shopping portal activity and the total is more than you know what to do with, perhaps it’d make more sense to earn Hilton points even if the expected value from those is a little less.

Other hotel booking options

In this post I’ve focused on booking directly with Hilton and via Rove as that’s what the reader had specifically asked about. However, the same kind of approach can be taken when calculating the value from other hotel booking methods.

For example, you could click through to Hotels.com from a shopping portal to earn rewards from the portal. Your booking would then earn One Key Rewards (although the percentage you’ll earn will change soon), plus you could either pay with a Hotels.com gift card that you bought at a discount, or with a credit card that has a Hotels.com Amex Offer for prepaid stays loaded to it (such as this one that’s available at the time of publishing this post that gives 10% back).

Another example is credit card travel portals. Depending on your credit card, some bank travel portals award 8X, 10X, or 12X transferable points when booking hotel stays. Those high rewards might make it worth booking Hilton stays through them, especially if you have hotel booking credits to redeem on your card too. Again though, those would be regarded by the hotel as you having booked through an OTA, so you wouldn’t earn Hilton points on the stay, nor would you receive elite status benefits.

Are transfers to Hilton worth it?

The final part of the reader’s question asked whether it’s worth transferring points from a transferable currency to Hilton Honors.

Hilton is currently a partner of two transferable currencies: Bilt Rewards on a 1:1 basis and American Express Membership Rewards on a 1:2 basis. If you value Hilton points at 0.35 cpp, that makes transfers from both of those partners poor value, even with Amex’s 1:2 transfer ratio.

Both programs sometimes run transfer bonuses, but even then you’d be hard-pressed to recommend making a transfer nowadays as it’s getting increasingly difficult to get outsized value. For example, Amex sometimes runs a 20% transfer bonus to Hilton which makes the ratio 1:2.4. Let’s assume that there’s a Hilton stay you want to book that would cost $180 in cash (including taxes and fees) or 36,000 Hilton Honors points for the night.

If booking an award stay, that’d be a 0.5 cpp redemption which isn’t out of the realms of possibility. With a 20% transfer bonus from Amex, you’d need to transfer 15,000 Membership Rewards points. Saving $180 by transferring 15,000 points means you’d be getting a 1.2 cpp redemption value from your Membership Rewards which isn’t completely awful.

However, you can frequently get far more value from your Membership Rewards by transferring them to other transfer partners. If nothing else, if you have a Platinum Card® from American Express for Schwab, you can cash out Membership Rewards for 1.1 cpp. 15,000 points would therefore get you $165 in cash. That’s not quite enough to cover the hotel stay, but booking it as a paid stay would earn you Hilton points on the base spend, bonus points if you have elite status, bonus points if you pay with a Hilton credit card, credits if you have Amex cards with eligible credits, and rewards through a shopping portal or Rove as a Loyalty Eligible booking. Cashing out your Membership Rewards and booking a paid stay might therefore mean that the overall rewards you’d receive would exceed the value of transferring a similar number of points for an award stay.

All that means that unless there’s a good transfer bonus and you’re getting in excess of 0.5 cpp of value for an award booking, transferring your transferable points to Hilton generally isn’t going to be worth it.

Final thoughts

As you can see, there are all kinds of factors that go into assessing the different permutations of booking a Hilton stay directly versus your other options. That’s why my answer at the beginning of the post as to whether booking directly with Hilton or Rove was better was ‘It depends.’

That said, provided the cash rate with Rove isn’t much more expensive than the rate when booking directly, booking a Loyalty Eligible rate through Rove will be the most rewarding overall given the stacking potential.

If the rate isn’t Loyalty Eligible though, you’ll need to calculate your expected rewards based on which Hilton brand you’d be staying at, the points you’d earn for having elite status, the points you’d earn based on the credit card you pay with, the value of the elite status benefits you would (or wouldn’t) receive, the shopping portal rewards you could earn, etc.

One final thing I want to suggest is to try to avoid analysis paralysis. My wife and I lived in hotels and Airbnbs for 7.5 years and so I spent an inordinate amount of time researching accommodation options and, all too often, spent far more time trying to maximize things than I should have.

If the difference in rewards isn’t too massive, try not to sweat it. If you think you’d get 12% of value booking with Hilton but 13.2% booking with Rove, but only if you can get a certain redemption rate with Hilton, but you’re not sure what value to ascribe to Rove Miles as it’s new to you, but the elite benefits with Hilton might bump up the value, but if you don’t get a room upgrade then maybe not, but, but, but…just book something and try not to spend time second guessing yourself after the event. If you end up wishing you’d booked the alternative method then great—at least you know for the next time.

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