Frequent Miler's latest team challenge, Million Mile Madness, is almost done! The last two weeks Greg, Nick, and Stephen competed to earn 1 Million SAS miles by flying 15 airlines. But who completed the challenge with the most Speed, Affordability, and Style?
Thrifty Traveler flags the fact that there is a brand new Hilton property opening in the Maldives on July 1st, 2022 and awards are wide open, with nearly every day on the calendar available for an award stay between now and December 20th and then again most days from January 20, 2023 through the end of April are also available as standard award nights. This could be a great opportunity to get excellent value out of free night certificates.
The Deal
- The Hilton Maldives Amingiri Resort & Spa is opening July 1, 2022 and award nights are wide open. At 110K Hilton Honors points per night for a standard room award, the property isn’t cheap, but this could be a great use of Hilton’s 5th night free or free night certificates earned from the Hilton credit cards.
Quick Thoughts
The Hilton Maldives Amingiri Resort & Spa isn’t open yet, so all we know of how it will look is the renderings. However, those renderings look quite nice. Overwater villas are standard room awards and each room type at this property has a private plunge pool of its own.
While I’m sure this new property won’t be as luxurious as the Waldorf-Astoria and won’t have an underwater restaurant like the Conrad Maldives, I imagine it is hard to go wrong at a new resort in the Maldives. Indeed, last year Greg and I visited Le Meridien Maldives shortly after it opened and we were blown away (and it’s worth mentioning that I’ve known people who have gone more than once in the time since it opened and who love it as much as we did). Room rates at Le Meridien are typically cheaper than they are set to be at this new Hilton property and base rooms at Le Meridien did not include plunge pools. While I think the level of service at Le Meridien is hard to match, I imagine that this new Hilton property is likely set to be a step up in terms of luxury.
Add on top of that the fact that standard room awards are wide open through the end of the schedule apart from the Christmas / New Year holiday period and a small handful of spring dates and I imagine this will be of interest for many readers. While I’m not surprised that standard room awards are wide open in July when the property first opens, it is a pleasant surprise to see awards so widely available in 2023. It would be pretty easy to snag a 5-night stay next year and get the 5th night free, paying a net of 88,000 points per night.
Those award rates certainly aren’t cheap, but given how often Hilton sells points for half a cent each, one could buy the points for a 5 night stay for about $440 per night, which is about half off of the rates they appear to be asking. Those who have Hilton free night certificates, particularly those with certificates that can be used any night of the week, will no doubt be happy to put them to use here.
Speaking of cost, the Hilton Maldives Amingiri Resort & Spa will be accessible via speed boat transfer from the airport. That can be a plus or a minus. On the positive side, it’ll be a little bit cheaper to get to this property at $300 per adult round trip (versus the ~$420 that Greg and I paid for round trip sea plane transfers to Le Meridien). For those who don’t like the idea of a sea plane, the speed boat can be appealing (I read a story on Flyertalk of guests arriving after to a resort after a particularly turbulent flight who was in tears and needed assistance walking; we encountered no notable turbulence on the way to Le Meridien but we did hit some uncomfortable bumps on the way back to the airport). The flip side of course is that proximity to the airport / main city can mean more traffic both overhead and in the nearby seas, which can detract some from the isolated feeling for which the Maldives is so famous.
If you have Hilton points or free night certificates and desire to travel to the Maldives, this certainly seems like it could be an exciting opportunity. I doubt the award availability will stick around in perpetuity, so it likely makes sense to book sooner rather than later if interested. Just be sure to keep an eye on the cancellation policy.
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Add the $300 per person RT boat transfer from the airport a bit less than many of the $500’ish seaplane properties.
At Le Méridien Maldives for our second two week stay. Love it. Several other couples we know herez too. More likely to see our friends here than back in the US.
My first thought this new Hilton would be a good way to park FNCs to see if Conrad or WA last minute availability opens up. The issue is I’ve never gotten FNCs refunded in less than a couple days, too late to reliably switch a booking.
Nick you usually do your homework but you definitely were super lazy this time, just copy and paste!
This hotel has been on hilton for a while and awards were available for at least 3 months now(I booked an award 2 months ago on hilton.com). Here is an article that goes over this hotel: https://loyaltylobby.com/2022/03/28/hilton-amingiri-resort-opens-in-september-2022/
First of all, I didn’t copy and paste anything. I cited the source – Thrifty Traveler – but to call that lazy or insinuate that I didn’t search availability and write the post myself isn’t true and doesn’t make sense to me.
Greg sent me a post he saw at Thrifty Traveler about availability being wide open. It was the first either of us had heard about it. The purpose of Quick Deals is to get information out quickly, so I don’t typically Google to try to find the first article ever written about a property or topic — I just cite the source where I / we learned about it (unless they cite a previous source, in which case I’ll typically cite that source or both). The purpose of a Quick Deal is to get the info out so people can take advantage of the deal — this wasn’t a deep dive on anything.
The article you link to at Loyalty Lobby is from less than two months ago and says that there had been availability bookable one day before the post was published (and they only show a total of 3 days available in all of the month of September rather than every single day in September as was the case at the time of publication today) and Loyalty Lobby notes that Hilton had pulled all availability as of the time of publication, so it doesn’t sound like awards were available for the last 3 months as you say, though maybe they came back a day after Loyalty Lobby published that and have been available daily since. Either way, it doesn’t really matter — availability is wide open now and so readers with points or certificates can book it now, so it certainly made sense to us to publish about that opportunity so people can take advantage.
If you have a tip like that a new hotel is bookable in the Maldives, we certainly always appreciate a heads up — feel free to flag it for us in the “contact us” page. In this case, Thrifty Traveler is the site where we noticed this. Even had I seen the Loyalty Lobby post in March, since awards weren’t bookable at that point, I probably wouldn’t have published it then. Here it made sense to me since a lot of people have free night certs and points to use. Even if I knew for a fact that it had been widely available for booking for the last three months, it wouldn’t make sense not to alert people, would it?
Don’t you just live it when an idiot dogs out your post? .
Anyways, thanks for the great info! I just bagged a 5 nighter at this Hilton property for March next year! I’ll be super excited to hear the reviews before I go to make sure it’s worth 440,000 HHonors points. Plus, I’ll have my 10 night Le Meridien stay in August, so I will already know the logistics and learn a few new things before 2023!
Thanks again Nick!
@Ivan Y You linked an article that claims the hotel opens in September 2022. Perhaps it was time for for someone to post an update.
Thanks, Nick.