Hilton Honors made changing on number of points required for awards at many of its hotels unannounced the other week (read more here).
Honors made a decision in the spring of 2018 not to disclose any award chart changes or when new properties are added to the program as they had done for years.
You can access Hilton’s Points Explorer here.
READ MORE: Hilton Honors Rate & Bonus Points Promotions
We have compiled the list below that captures 95% to 98% of the changes. There are maximum of 20 to 30 properties that are not included.
Conclusion
There are no hotels that would require less points than in April 2019 when we last compiled the Hilton Master Property List (new one coming on Wednesday).
This change affected total of 997 of Hilton’s close to 6,000 hotels (17% to be exact). 91% of these changes are for hotels in the United States (as 81% of all Hilton hotels are in that country). 146 hotels require 5,000 more points and 851 went up to 10,000.
Changes are not as drastic as I first feared and the maximum hasn’t changed from 95K (except Waldorf Astoria Maldives at 120K). These changes, however, slowly shift the number of points required higher step by step and at some point the 95K ceiling is gone.
The Conrad Bora Bora Nui finally moved from 80K to 90K points per night.
![Airfare of the Day [Premium Economy] BRITISH AIRWAYS Bangkok to Barcelona from $964](https://cdn2.loyaltylobby.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/xsagrada-familia-g896f68bc3_1280-barcelona-120x86.jpg.pagespeed.ic.axGrM49yVK.jpg)
Considering the alarm raise last week by some bloggers and on FlyerTalk about Hilton purported duplicity in sneakily raising the top award rates at “tons of properties”, I would’ve thought the news here should have elicited collective and audible sight of relief, as well as some mea culpas. I did not expect total silence right away, although I’d called the claims of a massive sneaky devaluation a “tempest in a teapot” that I was sure would die quickly like all such tempests do.
It was massive and purely sneaky devaluation. Do you know the meaning of the word transparent?
Btw by posting you utter nonsense on every possible blog where you’re not banned yet you don’t do a good service to Hilton. Really.
Pissed off that I have been proved right again, I see. Nonsense is what you just posted in the comments section of a post that just rebutted loud claims of a massive ‘devaluation’!!!
Please click on the link in the post you responded to and get the answers. Do not respond without having read the linked post and making a coherent case (if that is even possible).
BTW: Name a site that banned me (you’ll crow if you name the site I think you have in mind when I link the forum host stating otherwise), or just shut it up for good.
I am very grateful for the service you have offered us here, and I am satisfied that you can make a livelihood by having access to my data and communications. Fine. Would you be so kind as to inform me and maybe other subscribers how to UNLOCK this pdf, so that I can convert it to an spreadsheet? Many thanks!
The full MPL to be posted in a day or two will have an Excel version as well as a PDF.
John thanks again for a great job done. Could you please include state, not just the city in you next MPL? I find that MPL without state marker makes en entire list for the US basically useless.
Thank you for the feedback, we will fit this on our next MPL, as one to be published had already been finalized.
I think it’s very unfair to use the word “changes” when there is in fact not a single hotel which has has decreased the amount of points necessary. Anyway thank you so much for publishing this, it’s of great use for all of us.
Not that Hilton points were useful earlier, but this devaluation is quite nasty (since a) not even one price going down and b) some increases are insane).
Thanks very much for this. That Hilton doesn’t make this available themselves is a disservice to Honors members indicative of a lack of respect in my view.
Contrary to what this article would want you to believe, the effect of the changes by Hilton are actually far more reaching than 17%. In fact, the number of properties where there is a potential increase in redemption cost is actually just over 64%, because the Loyalty Lobby analysis only looks at the maximum redemption cost, while completely ignoring the minimum redemption value (which, in many instances, was increased to equal the maximum).
Doing a comparison of the June property list to the April property list, I found a total of 5,498 matching hotels between the two (removing properties that were added or subtracted in the interim). Of those 5,498 hotels, only 1,116 hotels had no changes to their award cost, either at the minimum or maximum rates. Also, there were 839 hotels whose only change was a decrease in the minimum (with no change to the maximum), so of the 5,498 hotels, 1,955 hotels, or 35.6 percent, either had no price change at all or the price actually went down.
That leaves 3,543 properties – or 64.4% – where either the maximum or minimum price (or both) increased. These are broken down as follows:
516 properties (9.4%) increased their maximum rate with no change to the minimum rate
304 properties (5.5%) increased both their maximum and minimum rates
178 properties (3.2%) increased their maximum rate, but decreased their minimum rate
2,545 properties (46.3%) increased their minimum rate with no change to the maximum rate
All told, 998 properties (18.2%) increased their maximum rates – of those, 146 increased by 5,000 points, and 852 increased by 10,000 points. For 38 of the hotels, their increase was a 100% increase in the redemption value, and for 37 of the properties, their increase was an 11.1% increase (all of which were properties that increased from 45,000 to 50,000 points). The bulk of the increases were in the 25% to 33.3% range (284 and 318 properties, respectively), but there are increases at all levels throughout the redemption chart.
For the 2,849 properties that increased their minimum rates, nearly a quarter (707) were increases of only 1,000 points; and 526 increased by 2,000 points. For those properties, the increase to the minimum is an average increase of approximately 5.6%. Once you get above the 2,000 threshold, though, the average increase gets more drastic – the 320 hotels where the minimum increased by 3,000 points represents an average increase of 11.9%; the 312 hotels where the minimum increased by 4,000 points represents an average increase of 15.9%, and the 218 hotels where the minimum increased by 5,000 points represents an average increase of 20.3%.
There are a total of 276 properties where the minimum redemption, in fact, increased by more than 10,000 points, with 36 of those properties increasing their minimum by 20,000 points or more. (The most drastic change was an increase of 42,000 points for the Hampton Inn in Corolla, NC, which now has a minimum of 70,000 points for redemption.)
On the flip side, there were 1,017 properties where the minimum redemption level changed (839 where there was no change to the maximum, and 178 where the maximum rate increased). Those, two, tended to cluster towards the bottom end, with 791 of the properties decreasing the minimum by 5,000 points or less. There are 88 properties where the minimum decrease is 10,000 points or more, and of those, 13 are decreases of 20,000 points or more (with the largest decrease being at the Hilton Clearwater Beach Resort in Florida, whose minimum dropped from 60,000 points to 19,000 points per night).
Also, of the 2,849 properties that increased their minimum rates, 545 increased their minimums such that the minimum and the maximum are now the same. Of those 545, four (the HGI in Belo Horizonte, Brazil; the Homewood Suites in Rancho Cucamonga, CA, and Troy, MI, and the Hampton Inn in El Dorado, AR) increased both the minimum and maximum rates at the same time.
Further, it should be noted that the changes to the minimum rates (either up or down) is potentially understated due to the limitations in the data provided by Loyalty Lobby, as 509 properties (9.3%) have a minimum listed of zero due to the limitations of the Hilton system. These are properties where the PointsExplorer does not specifically give the minimum redemption (and instead tells you to search for the lowest rates instead), so the magnitude of the increases and decreases is going to be different than what these numbers represent.
(In other words, it’s likely that the end result is that there are going to be fewer than 1,116 properties where there is no change to award costs, either up or down.)
In summary, though there are instances where the changes to the redemption levels can be a benefit to someone who might wish to use points, I believe that the end result of this change is simply narrowing the field of properties where using points provides outsized value. This can particularly be seen at the low end, with the 100% increase in redemption costs for the old 5k and 10k hotels previously discussed here and elsewhere, but there are also more than a dozen higher-end properties (previously at 70k or 80k points) that have a 10k higher maximum now as well.
Certainly, I also think that the portrayals of these changes being minor are misleading at best, because they ignore the fact that the bulk of the increases in costs are at the minimum side, which only further to reduce the opportunities that may exist for good-value redemptions at more moderately-priced hotels during non-peak seasons.