PSA: Hilton award searches only display price of first night

6

When you do an award search on a hotel’s website, the price you see isn’t necessarily the price you’ll get.

Some companies like IHG do display a price which is an average of the points requirement for each night of your stay, so that’s straightforward enough. Hyatt will display the lowest pricing that’s available for at least one night of your stay, so they display it as ‘Rates from x,xxx points/night’ even if that price isn’t what’s charged for every single night of your stay.

Hilton meanwhile shows you what the pricing will be for the first night of your stay. In the event that the hotel you’re interested in charges the same number of points each night, that’s fine. That’s not always the case though and so it can be easy to overlook that you’re being charged more than you expect.

Hilton Honors award pricing

For example, let’s say you want to visit Bozeman, MT this summer. When doing a multi-night award search as shown in the screenshot above, both the Hampton Inn and Homewood Suites are available for 60,000 points.

Note that wording though – 60,000 points for first night (my bolding).

If you click through to the Hampton Inn, what you see is what you get, for the dates I checked at least. For the four nights I searched in August, each night is 60,000 points per night. (Side note: if you were to book a four night stay and you have Silver status or higher with Hilton, you might as well book a fifth night seeing as you get every fifth night free on award stays. Even if you don’t need to stay an additional night, it acts as a de facto late checkout, so you don’t have to be out by 11am or 12pm (or whatever the checkout time is at the property you’re booking.))

Hilton Honors award pricing - Hampton Inn Bozeman award pricing breakdown

Compare that to the Homewood Suites Bozeman. The search results page listed award pricing of 60,000 points for the first night too. When selecting your room, it also shows rooms bookable for 60,000 points.

Hilton Honors award pricing - Homewood Suites Bozeman award pricing.

If you’re not paying close attention, you could end up proceeding through the booking process and not noticing the total award pricing. In this particular case, there’s a significant increase in award pricing for a couple of nights, almost doubling the 60,000 nightly price to 113,000 and 116,000 points for the final two nights respectively.

Hilton Honors award pricing - Homewood Suites Bozeman award pricing breakdown

Hilton isn’t necessarily doing anything shady here because they do display the total award pricing clearly, albeit with this more detailed pricing breakdown being hidden beneath a dropdown button. It’s just something you need to pay attention to, especially if you have an abundance of Hilton Honors points where you wouldn’t pick up on the increased total price like you would if you ended up having insufficient points.

I don’t get the impression that Hilton is doing this to deliberately mislead customers. That’s because this approach can potentially work against them by disincentivizing customers from booking with them due to high prices being displayed for the first night.

For example, we’ll use that same property – Homewood Suites Bozeman. If you booked a stay starting a couple of nights later, it would show the first night price of 115,000 points.

Hilton Honors award pricing later

I imagine many people would balk at redeeming 115,000 points for the Homewood Suites when the Hampton Inn is available for almost half that price. However, it’s not 115,000 points every night for four nights. Instead, nights two and three drop to 60,000 points per night, with the fourth night also being lower at 85,000 points for the night.

Hilton Honors award pricing - Homewood Suites Bozeman award pricing breakdown later

Personally, I’d much prefer it if Hilton displayed an average price for multi-night award stays. In this latest scenario, it would mean Hilton would show award pricing as being an average of 80,000 points per night rather than 115,000 points for the first night. In the earlier scenario, it would mean that rather than displaying 60,000 points as the price for the first night, it would display 87,250 points as the average for the four nights (seeing as the total would be 349,000 points). That would make things much more clear now that Hilton uses dynamic pricing rather than having a fixed award rate like they did in years past.

For now though, it simply means that any time that you plan on booking a Hilton award stay of two or more nights, it’s important to verify the number of points being charged.

Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

6 Comments
newest
oldest most voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Teri

“Hilton isn’t necessarily doing anything shady…”
It certainly is shady, which is why Hilton does it. Let’s not give them a free pass just because some of us are smart enough to catch it. If it were up to Hilton, they would straight-up lie and deceive the customers into paying more than advertised (e.g., separate resort fees or “only one room left”).

Andrew

What stands out as more egregious to me is how large the variation at this property is for Standard Room Reward pricing. I know we’ve seen some Waldorfs and Conrads that varied anywhere from 10000 – 50000 points depending on peak pricing (very few in the 50000 range), but those are properties that already carry 100K+ pricing pretty much every night. A Homewood Suites nearly doubling standard rooms to shy of 120K is very troubling. Checking the cash rates in August at that property every night is available for under $500 and the cash difference looks to only be about $50 between some of the nights that are 60K and some that are 100K+.

Was the dynamic standard reward pricing noted as affecting more “average” Hiltons when it first dropped? I seemed to remember the article focusing on aspirational properties, I didn’t realize it was happening with Hamptons and Homewoods too.

Andrew

That would make sense why they’d want to jack up awards at that time. I’m just surprised it has little connection to the cash pricing and at the elevated rates still presents pretty bad value (115K points for a ~$450 room?).

For the aspirational properties I remember jumping rates up to 150K they still gave good value if you really wanted to stay those times. It was periods like Christmas where cash rates were nearing $2K. 150K was worse than 100K but still yielding 1 cpp or better. This Homewood Suites almost seems to be screaming “we don’t ever want you to stay on awards here and will make darn sure it’s not worth it”.

Frank

Very annoying if you don’t have enough points in your account, it won’t show you the total points price. So you have to guess, if transferring from Amex, and maybe it will be correct. Further, if you price out each night separately, often the four night price is more points than each of the four nights added together! Or their “dynamic” pricing is such that you get a points price quoted, then take 5 minutes to transfer from Amex, and suddenly the points price is 10 or 20% higher. Hilton has so many great hotels but their website is surprisingly second rate.

Andrew

I’ve always been able to click the “More Rates From…” button and then click on the little “i” information circle next to the points room reward rate to see the total points price listed out.

I do see that this doesn’t work if you have less than 5000 points in your Hilton account (first time mine has been that low in a while!), but it works without having enough points to book the property.