UPDATE: Hilton Award Category Changes 2014

Yesterday, I wrote about apparent Hilton award category changes for 2014 and noted that I had contacted Hilton and requested a statement. The statement did arrive after I had published the piece that you can access here.

Here’s the statement from Mark Weinstein, vice president, commercial services strategy, loyalty programs & partnerships, Hilton Worldwide.:

We have recently seen rumors falsely claiming that we plan to implement annual category changes without notifying our members.  This is not the case.  To be clear – we have no plans to make major reward category changes, add new hotel reward categories or make any new major changes to the HHonors program this year.  In fact, we are  taking steps to be even more transparent by better communicating adjustments within the reward categories.

We do periodically review our hotel reward categories as new hotels join the program and market dynamics change.  As part of that ongoing process, in the coming weeks we will provide an update on a few minor adjustments – with some hotels moving up and some moving down.  While we are not quite ready to share the specific hotels, these adjustments will be significantly less than anything being speculated.

We believe that transparency and trust are critical elements of our relationship with our members.  In order to give full visibility into any hotel category adjustments – including the introduction of new redemption hotels – we will be sharing a regularly updated list of adjusted hotels on HHonors.com.   HHonors members will be able to see which hotels are changing categories, as well as the category assignments for new hotels.  We plan to make this list available in the coming weeks and we are committed to keeping the list updated on a regular basis.

Doubletree Goa

The move from category 1 to 3 has now been reverted and the hotel is again available for 5,000 points as far as the hotel room inventory is available for sale.

Doubletree Atlanta Airport

The hotel is again available for 10,000 points per night intead of requiring 20,000 from April 1, 2014, as was the situation yesterday.

Conclusion

Seems that there are going to be hotels moving up and down in award categories sometime next month, but Hilton is not yet ready to publicize them.

Someone at the Hilton HHonors must have changed the award categories of number of hotels early and these changes have now been reverted.