How I did on the American Express Hilton Aspire card
/I wrote previously about using the American Express Hilton Aspire card to cover most of the cost of my honeymoon in Hawaii at the Grand Wailea, A Waldorf Astoria Resort. Since I cancelled the card as planned earlier this year, I thought I’d give a rundown of the total value proposition I ultimately got from it.
Signup bonus
For signing up for the card using my referral link, my partner received 150,000 Hilton Honors points and I received another 20,000 (we also got another 12,000 from meeting the minimum spend requirement for the card, but that’s less than I’d earn putting the spend on my own Hilton Surpass card, so we can set that aside). Hilton now allows you to easily and (relatively) quickly combine points from multiple accounts, so we pooled those points to pay for about 45% of our five-night stay, which I value at $1,900 (half a cent per point).
Total value: $855
Free night certificate
The Hilton Aspire card also comes with a free weekend night certificate on approval. To be honest, we did so much traveling in 2019 that I don’t remember which specific night we redeemed this award for, but since we typically stay in 40,000-point-per-night properties, I’ll assume we redeemed the certificate for “about” 40,000 points.
Total value: $200
Resort credit
If you’re a travel hacking junkie you may have recently read that American Express was issuing $250 resort credits to folks who had not completed eligible resort stays in 2020. There seems to be some confusion over exactly what’s going on, but this wasn’t news to me: after completing our stay in early January, 2019, our $250 resort credit posted automatically a week or two later. Then, in roughly April of 2019, a second $250 credit posted without explanation.
The most obvious explanation to me is that since the card was launched so recently, there were some early coding errors which kept some resort credits from posting automatically. When they discovered the error, American Express then manually applied an additional $250 credit to all accounts that had eligible resort activity, whether or not they had received an automatic credit.
I value the first, correct $250 resort credit at about $125 (we wouldn’t have run up the charges we did if they weren’t going to be reimbursed), and the second, incorrect credit at full value.
Total value: $375
Airline fee credits
If all the above makes it sound like I’m bragging, here’s the part where I prove that’s not true: I blew it on maximizing the card’s airline fee credits. The plan was to receive 3 years’ worth of airline fee credits while paying a single annual fee: in late 2018, in 2019, and in early 2019 before cancelling the card.
2018 went according to plan: we received the card in late 2018, quickly designated American Airlines as our airline, and bought 2 $100 electronic gift cards. The credits posted quickly, but we forfeited the remaining $50 in credits. Fortunately, the cards were used for flights my partner would have otherwise paid cash for, so I assign them the full $200 in value.
The right move in 2019 would have been to immediately buy another $200 in cards. But with our January travel, it just didn’t happen, and then I saw reports that gift cards had stopped triggering credits. Other options (JetBlue pet fees, etc.) still worked, but that would have involved switching the designated airline, learning the new technique, and monitoring the account all over again. So I did…nothing. We used the card for a few American Airlines checked bag fees in 2019, but I believe we received a total of $40 in 2019 credits.
For much the same reason, 2020 was a complete write-off, before we cancelled the card in late January.
Total value: $240
Unlimited Priority Pass membership
This is definitely the benefit that I was most surprised by: it turns out there are a lot of Priority Pass lounges! One issue when you have free lounge passes, whether through elite status, SkyBonus redemptions, or the 10 annual visits through the American Express Hilton Surpass card is that you constantly have to weigh whether you’re going to be laid over in an airport long enough to justify burning one of your lounge passes.
But with an unlimited membership, you can just pop in for some celery sticks or cheese cubes; it’s kind of an awesome feeling. It’s hard to put a value on something you would never pay for, but in a heavy travel year like 2019, an unlimited Priority Pass membership was very conservatively worth $100 to me.
Total value: $100
Diamond status
Worthless, I already have it and can book reservations for my partner when she’s traveling without me.
Total value: $0
Conclusion
The basic math here looks pretty good: I paid a $450 annual fee for what I have tried to conservatively calculate as $1,770 in value. Of course, part of that was a fluke: it would have been $250 less if American Express hadn’t awarded us two resort credits. Likewise, part of that was human error: it would have been $510 more if I had been able to trigger all 3 airline fee credits.
If you’re wondering whether the card is worth getting, the obvious answer is yes, if you can:
get it at the end of the year;
through a referral;
with a plan to use your points for a high-value stay;
and a plan to use your weekend night;
and a plan to use your resort credit;
and a plan to use your airline fee credit.
If you meet all those requirements, you can easily get several thousand dollars in value for a single $450 annual fee.
But this is the first card I had my partner sign up for in what Frequent Miler calls “two-player mode,” and let me tell you, it is absolutely exhausting. We ended up doing ok this time, but I’m not planning to try it again any time soon. You probably already know whether your partner has any interest in travel hacking, and if they don’t, you’re not going to convince them with some free cheese cubes in an Alaska Airlines lounge.
