Hilton To Make Four Positive & One BIG Negative Changes To It’s Loyalty Program

Update: Looks like Hilton buried the lead on this one. They are also removing award categories, this can’t be good.

Hilton have announced several changes to their loyalty program, the first change is purely comestic and the rewards program will now be called Hilton Honors rather than Hilton HHonors (one less H). The other changes are more substantial and are as follows.

Contents

1 Points & Money Bookings
2 Points Pooling
3 Amazon Shop With Points
4 Diamond Status Extension
5 Infographic
6 Our Verdict

Points & Money Bookings

You’ll now be able to use a combination of both cash and points to book Hilton properties. You use a slide to choose how many points/how much cash you’d like to use and there is a minimum of 5,000 points per night required. This scheduled for released by the end of February.

Points Pooling

Hilton will allow it’s members to pool their points with up to 10 friends or family members, no fee will be charged for pooling points. There are also some unknown restrictions on pooling points that haven’t been revealed. This is scheduled for a spring release.

Amazon Shop With Points

Hilton will allow you to use their points on Amazon purchases. Scheduled for a summer release, with no point value currently mentioned.

Diamond Status Extension

Diamond members that have had diamond status for at least three years and 250 nights or have accumulated 500,000 points will be able to extend their diamond status for one year for any reason. This benefit can only be used once. No release date scheduled.

Infographic

Our Verdict

Really difficult to know how good these program changes will be without more details, but at least none of them are negatives (expect maybe the Diamond status extension for those that always do qualify for Diamond status and want less Diamond status members in the system to improve their odds of upgrade).

I doubt the Amazon rate will be competitive, but anything over 0.3-0.5¢ will see at least some use. Points & Cash (Money) bookings will really depend on what the cash co-pay is like. Points pooling sounds great, but I’d like to know what those unknown restrictions are. Hopefully Hilton doesn’t decide to do a mass devaluation at the same time as these features are introduced.

There were some rumors of Diamond+ status being introduced (and American Express launching a Diamond card), no mention of anything like this currently so who knows if that will be a thing going forward or not.

Hat tip to View From The Wing