Two increased (and one crashed) signup bonuses that caught even my attention

Long-time readers know that I don’t have much interest in signup bonuses. Obviously if there’s a card you want, it’s better to apply when the bonus is high rather than low, but that’s not something in your control. I vastly prefer to focus on what I can control: where to allocate spend, which points to earn, and when and where to redeem them.

But a few signup bonuses passed across my desk recently that got even my jaded attention.

Hilton Honors no-annual-fee and Surpass 180,000/200,000 bonus points

Hilton Honors points are not each particularly valuable. Unlike World of Hyatt points which can be redeemed at relatively low numbers for even the most luxurious properties, you need a lot of Hilton Honors points to do anything interesting.

This is one of the general reasons many people consider Chase Ultimate Rewards Points more valuable than American Express Membership Rewards: despite the occasional transfer bonus, the ability to both earn bonused Ultimate Rewards points and transfer them one-to-one to a program like World of Hyatt makes the program attractive to folks who aren’t interested in chasing signup bonuses.

However, while Hilton Honors points are worth less, they aren’t worthless, and there are still fun things you can do with them, especially if you have a lot of them.

While some of our finest scholars have attempted to determine the correct value of Hilton Honors points, I think it’s worth turning the question around: how little would Hilton Honors points need to be worth to make these offers worth applying for? At just 0.3 cents per point, 200,000 Hilton Honors points are worth $600.

You may ask, “why would anyone redeem Hilton Honors points for 0.3 cents each?” but that exactly proves my point: an absurdly low per-point valuation still gives you a pretty high total valuation for these offers.

You can see the current personal referral offers I have on my Support the Site! page, although as far as I can tell the referral offers simply reduce the referee’s points by the amount received by the referrer, so if you don’t want to support this site, just apply through one or more incognito windows, as Frequent Miler describes here.

A final consideration is that Hilton points are relatively easy to consolidate, so it’s possible for partners to refer these offers to each other and then consolidate the points in a single account in order to take advantage of benefits like free breakfast, lounge access, and 5th-night-free award redemptions.

Chase Ink signup bonuses

A second signup bonus arrived by e-mail, with Chase suggesting I invite my fellow business owners to apply for the Ink family of cards. I’ve carried a Chase Ink Plus card more or less forever, but don’t recall the last time I saw a 100,000 Ultimate Rewards point signup bonus.

If the Hilton Honors Surpass card has a $600 minimum value, 100,000 Ultimate Rewards point have a $1,250 minimum value just by booking airfare or hotels through the portal.

Obviously transfers to Hyatt, Southwest, or Chase’s other airline partners can double or triple that value.

Chase World of Hyatt cratered bonus

Unfortunately, Chase flipped the script when it came to the World of Hyatt credit card and has radically reduced the value to new applicants. Instead of offering 60,000 points after spending $6,000, they’re now offering just 30,000 World of Hyatt points after $3,000 in spend, and then 2 points per dollar after that up to $15,000 in spend during the first 6 months.

This is supposed to look to civilians like a 60,000-point offer, but we know better than that.