Our Compensation Clinic makes a stop at the Hilton Tokyo Narita Airport, where I had a stay approximately 3 weeks ago using 20,000 Hilton Honors points.
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You can access Hilton Narita’s website here.
READ MORE: Hilton Honors Rate & Bonus Points And Miles Promotions
I’ve stayed at the Hilton Narita many many times, and in fact it was the first hotel I ever stayed at in Japan about 15 years ago. I’ve also covered the property in a quite positive way through some articles over the years but this time it was a pretty negative experience.
One mayor issue is that between 10am-4pm they only run one shuttle bus per hour which is totally unacceptable for an airport hotel. Said shuttle bus also smelled like vomit which was absolutely crazy, not sure where that came from or why they wouldn’t use a different bus even if some guest had been vomiting into the bus.
The day of my arrival there was also an IT outage and it wasn’t possible for them to check people in until early evening. While the hotel had prepared room keys for Diamond members including myself the front desk was mayhem. A silver member who was on the same bus (arriving at 4:20pm) was told to come back at 5:30 pm for check in. The priority check-in lineup was completely disregarded, very untypical for Japan where people are very much by the book.
These IT issues also prevented guests from logging into the internet. Eventually it was possible to use a generic code in the public area.
I decided to file a claim with Hilton Guest Assistance about this matter and ask for points to be refunded to my Hilton account.
After three weeks have passed I checked my account for something unrelated and saw that the 20,000 points had been reversed and not only once but TWICE.
I wonder why they did this, maybe just a random error. In the end, it won’t matter much as I’ll likely spend these 40k at the same hotel again over the year. Rates have really shot up at the Narita Hilton compared to a few years ago when it was possible to stay there for way below $100 a night. Now it’s often more than double that amount. 20k Hilton points is a very good ratio for this property.
Conclusion
I find the Hilton Guest Assistance quite useful for Diamond Members as queries are usually answered promptly when directed via email to Diamond@Hilton.com where they then open a file.
The Hotel has a certain amount of time to answer to that file before corporate takes action and usually issues one of the famous Be My Guest certificates, which we have covered here. These can be used at any hotel worldwide whose brand is printed on the certificate. In this case the hotel answered and I received points though.
