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In addition to the new transfer bonus to Virgin Atlantic, American Express is offering a bonus when transferring Membership Rewards to your Hilton Honors account. The rate is targeted, although you might not be targeted for a bonus at all.
The Deal
- Get a 40% or 50% bonus when transferring American Express Membership Rewards to Hilton Honors.
Key Terms
- Expiry date unknown.
Quick Thoughts
Membership Rewards normally transfer to Hilton on a 1:2 basis in increments of 1,000. My wife’s account was targeted for a 50% bonus which means she can transfer at a 1:3 rate. My account on the other hand was only targeted for a 40% bonus, meaning I can transfer at a 1:2.8 rate.
Many people value the Amex Hilton Surpass card for its ability to earn 6x Hilton Honors points on grocery store spend. If you have an Amex Gold card and are targeted for the 50% bonus, that effectively makes it a 12x Hilton card at grocery stores seeing as it earns 4x on the first $25,000 of grocery store spend. I’d prefer using Membership Rewards in other ways, but there are times it might make sense transferring to Hilton, especially if you already don’t have a stack of Honors points.
For example, my wife was stuck overnight in Charlotte earlier this year due to weather. Needless to say, a lot of other passengers were in the same position and so hotel prices shot way up. For example, the DoubleTree Charlotte Airport was charging $337.71 for a last minute booking.
Despite Hilton moving to dynamic pricing, they were only charging 20,000 Hilton Honors points for that same room.
That’s 1.69cpp of value which is excellent for Hilton. We have a healthy balance of Hilton Honors points already and so there was no need to transfer over any Membership Rewards to book that award night. If we’d had no Hilton points and this 1:3 transfer rate was available at the time, I’d certainly have been tempted to transfer over 7,000 Membership Rewards.
Note that there’s no expiry date stated for this transfer bonus, so it could end at any time.
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Targeted at 50%, but I recently moved most of my MR out, and I would only transfer to Hilton to top up my account to 380k so that I could do 4NF at a 95k a night hotel. So I’ll probably pass.
Only targeted at 40% and DW at 50% – but outside a few bucket list award stays in over-water Villas at Conrads or Waldorf in the Maldives or Bora-Bora, MR tend to be a lot more valuable redeemed other ways IMHO.
That said Hilton has launched a new sale for stays thru 9.30.2020 up to 30% in London/Paris, 25% in much of Asia, and ~15% Austrasia for two night stays pre-paid non refundable.
May end up taking advantage of it last week booked Delta One suites (Virgin 60K MR pp of course I did before the VA transfer bonus ) to Shanghai, and we journey on to Fiji, NZ and AU spending from a few days to a week+ in each country we can book nights in China until 2.1.2020 under the sale all other locations till 1.12.2020. Mulling having DW pickup a Aspire as well seems like the best Premium AmEx card vs AF.
Link:
https://discover.hilton.com/en_ap/offers/apac-year-end-sale/
It’s a little silly to imply that the Charlotte room is worth $338 and that you are getting 1.69cpp. Anyone could just buy the Hilton points needed with 1 minute of effort, and recently for as low as 0.5cpp, ie. $100 for the room. If someone pays $338 they are massively overpaying, just like if someone doesn’t use any coupon when shopping at Macy’s.