Top-tier Hilton properties eligible for the Aspire resort credit

Thanks to lifecycle effects I haven’t taken as many sprawling international vacations as I did when my life was governed by the academic calendar, which has had the ancillary effect of nudging me towards somewhat more luxurious travel plans. To give a trivial illustration, 250,000 annual Ultimate Rewards points earned through office supply spend on a Chase Ink Plus are worth 16 nights at 15,000-point World of Hyatt properties but only 8 nights at 30,000-point World of Hyatt properties, so the decision of whether to stay at a 15,000-point property or a 30,000-point property is in part governed by how many nights I need to book each year.

That has made me more curious about top-tier properties in each chain, like the Grand Wailea in Maui where we stayed earlier this month. Since I earn a lot of Hilton Honors points (and they can be purchased for less than 0.5 cents each through a cash back portal during Hilton’s frequent promotions), I wanted to take a look at all the top-tier Hilton properties where the Hilton Honors Aspire American Express card’s $250 resort credit can be redeemed.

In principle, these would be the properties where you can get the most value (in points) from American Express free weekend night certificates, the elite 5th-night-free benefit on award stays, and the Aspire credit card resort statement credit. I couldn’t find an existing list anywhere online, so I decided to assemble it myself for my and your future reference.

95,000-point Hilton Honors properties eligible for $250 Aspire resort credit

Note that due to Hilton variable award pricing, these are properties where the maximum, standard room award rate is 95,000 points. The actual rate for the dates you want may vary, sometimes substantially, below the maximum rate. After each property, I’ve indicated a sample redemption value for a 5-night, 380,000-point reservation 6 months from now.

Waldorf Astoria

• Grand Wailea, A Waldorf Astoria Resort, $3,467.42 (0.96 cents per point)

Curio Collection by Hilton

• Hotel del Coronado, Curio Collection by Hilton, $2,342.41 (0.62 cents per point)

Conrad

• Conrad Fort Lauderdale Beach, $1,903.73 (0.5 cents per point)

• Conrad Maldives Rangali Island, $4,249.29 (1.12 cents per point)

• Conrad Koh Samui, $3,404.35 (0.9 cents per point)

Hilton

• Hilton Odawara Resort & Spa, $1,967.32 (0.52 cents per point)

• Hilton Seychelles Northolme Resort & Spa, $3,111.88 (0.82 cents per point)

A clarifying exercise

I arrived at this list by applying two filters to the entire list of Hilton properties: eliminate properties that don’t have a maximum redemption rate of 95,000 points per night, and eliminate properties that don’t qualify for the Aspire resort credit. However, while this is a good way of determining the properties where you can take advantage of Hilton program rules to save the most points, it says nothing about where you can use Hilton Honors to save the most money. Indeed, since I looked at 5-night stays 6 months in the future (July, 2019), I didn’t even look at the highest-dollar-value redemptions at these properties, most of which I assume would fall over spring break, Thanksgiving, Christmas, or other peak-travel holidays.

Moreover, while there are only 15 total properties in the Hilton Honors system that charge a maximum of 95,000 points per night (according to Loyalty Lobby’s March, 2018, update) there are 65 properties that charge 80,000 points per night and 145 that charge a maximum of 70,000 points per night. In other words, there are ample areas to fish for high-value redemptions outside the 95,000-point pond.

Conclusion

I am a big fan of Hilton Honors, but since I use my miles and points to book the trips I want to go on, I was a bit disappointed by my findings. I had a great time at the Grand Wailea, and would happily return there, but don’t have any special interest in visiting the Maldives, Seychelles, or Koh Samui, let alone Coronado, California, or Fort Lauderdale, Florida, so the Hilton Odawara is the only property on this list I could conceivably plan on visiting in the foreseeable future.

Compare that to the list of top-tier World of Hyatt properties: New York, Paris, Milan, Zurich, Sydney, and Tokyo are all cities I’d be happy to splurge for a stay on with points (New York’s Park Hyatt was a bust, but Zurich’s was lovely).

That doesn’t mean you can’t get good value during your first year of Aspire cardmembership stacking free-weekend-night and 5th-night-free awards with the card’s $250 resort credit. But it does mean that you may want to hunt for the highest dollar-value savings outside the highest point-cost properties.

Quick hit: when are you eligible for your first Hilton Honors Aspire American Express resort credit?

I started writing this blog because I was frustrated by how imprecise and inaccurate the mainstream travel hacking bloggers I was reading at the time were. In some ways that situation has gotten a lot worse, as credit card affiliate blogs have consolidated and become ever more limited in what kinds of deals they’re able to talk about, while in other ways it’s improved, as more independent bloggers have started writing without relying on affiliate revenue.

As careful as I am to be as accurate and precise as possible, I got caught out on Wednesday by two commenters asking versions of the same question: when are you eligible for your first $250 Hilton Honors Aspire American Express resort credit? This is a question it genuinely hadn’t occurred to me to ask.

The source of the confusion

The reason my commenters were confused arises from the fact that the resort credit is described in at least 2 different ways in different places:

• on the American Express credit card application: “With your Hilton Honors American Express Aspire Card, enjoy up to $250 in statement credits each year of Card Membership for eligible purchases at participating Hilton Resorts.”

• on the American Express “benefits” tab for existing cardholders: “Upon renewal of your Card, enjoy $250 in Hilton Resort Credits each year when you stay at a participating resorts within the Hilton portfolio.”

This raises the question, is the resort credit an anniversary benefit (like the bonus Radisson Rewards points offered by US Bank, or the Alaska Airlines companion ticket offered by Bank of America), or an annual benefit? If it’s the former, the value of the card drops enormously, since the credit would only be available if you kept the card or were able to make an eligible resort charge shortly after your first anniversary. If it’s the latter, you have an entire year of card membership to find a chance to use the credit before canceling the card.

My answer to this very good question

I was so flummoxed by these commenters I started to believe I may have actually misunderstood the terms of the benefit, something that has happened before and will happen again (always for the benefit of my readers). Had I relied too much on the seductive prose of affiliate bloggers? Had I, the anti-affiliate-blogger, become a pawn in their game?

But I quickly oriented myself and realized my original interpretation of the benefit, that it is available during your first year of card membership, had to be correct for a simple reason: the card is less than a year old, and people have already received resort credits. The relevant FlyerTalk thread has datapoints from as early as March, 2018, less than 3 months after the card was launched, so the benefit has to be available during the first year of card membership.

Conclusion: banks and loyalty programs love to out-legal themselves

If you squint at the conflicting language just right, you can start to see what American Express and Hilton were thinking: they wanted to make it as clear as possible that unlike the card’s $250 airline fee credit, which resets on January 1 of each year, the $250 resort credit is a cardmember year benefit, and they tried to express that concept in slightly different, slightly contradictory ways. While lawyers have fun pretending to speak with precision, English simply isn’t a surgical language. Here’s my modest attempt at reformulating the resort benefit:

“Each year of card membership, beginning with your first year, and continuing each additional year upon the anniversary of your account opening, enjoy $250 in Hilton Resort Credits each year when you stay at a participating resorts within the Hilton portfolio.”

As always, you can find my personal referral link on my Support the Site! page (feel free to use either my Hilton or Delta referral link, since they should both give you access to the same cards).

Gaming out my Waldorf Astoria stay

As I wrote last month, this January I’m heading to Maui for what I’m expecting to be an unusually-for-me expensive vacation, so I’ve spent some time in the past few weeks gaming out what the options are to save money on the trip without annoying my partner too much along the way.

Shorter car rental

Since we plan to drive around and explore Maui, I had initially planned to rent a car at the airport and drive to the Grand Wailea. I quickly realized this made no sense: not only would I pay for 5 days of car rental, but I’d also pay for five days of valet parking, since the Grand Wailea doesn’t have a self-park option.

By taking a cab or shuttle from and to the airport, I’ll save on both daily rental costs and daily valet parking: a roundtrip shuttle for two from the Grand Wailea’s preferred vendor costs just $99, and I may be able to shop around to bring that down even lower.

Amex Offer of $70 off $350

I was targeted for the current Amex Offer of $70 off $350 spent at “Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts in the US, Amsterdam, Berlin, Edinburgh, and Paris; and, Conrad Hotels & Resorts in the US.” While such promotions sometimes exclude Hawaii, this one doesn’t seem to, so I’ll use my Hilton Ascend American Express card to check in and put the first $350 of room charges on that card.

As I wrote in my original post, the Grand Wailea currently claims to give a $15 per person daily in-room dining credit as their Diamond breakfast benefit. Readers quickly pointed out in the comments that with a $7 delivery charge and 20% fixed gratuity, that works out to about $19 in actual food if you’re trying to spend the exact amount of the credit.

Instead of trying to game the room service menu to spend exactly $19 per day, I figure we’ll just order what we want and let the excess count towards the $350 threshold for my Amex Offer.

Hilton Honors American Express Aspire Card Referral

Thanks to American Express’s “universal referral” system, I can refer my partner to an Aspire card despite not having one myself (you can find my universal referral links on the Support the Site! page). I’ve written about it before, but it’s worth spelling out again just how good this deal is:

• I receive 20,000 Hilton Honors points for referring my partner;

• My partner receives 150,000 Hilton Honors points after spending $4,000 within 3 months;

• My partner gets a $250 airline fee credit in 2018 and another $250 airline fee credit in 2019;

• We already have an eligible stay planned where we’ll be able to use the $250 Hilton Resort statement credit (a cardmember year, not calendar year, benefit);

• And she’ll get an unlimited Priority Pass membership that allows up to 2 guests, so if I ask nicely she might take me with her into lounges when we travel.

182,000 Hilton Honors points (after earning 3 points per dollar on $4,000 in spend) are over half the points cost of our stay at the Grand Wailea, which I jokingly valued at $8,500 but realistically value at around $2,000. Valuing the airline and resort statement credits at half of face value, this works out to roughly $1,375.

I don’t like paying $450 annual fees. I’ve never paid a $450 annual fee. But this is a no-brainer for us since we already have a stay at an eligible resort booked.

Conclusion

There is one interesting question you might have after reading this: my Ascend card will get a 20% discount on exactly $350 in spend, while my partner’s Aspire card will get a 100% discount on up to $250 in spend, so which card should the first Grand Wailea room charges go on, and which card should be the backup?

In part, the answer is that we don’t have to decide until we know the final room charge. If it’s less than $350, we’ll put the entire charge on the Aspire card and get $250 back. If it’s more than $600, we’ll put $350 on the Ascend and the remainder on the Aspire, maximizing both opportunities (and the higher Hilton earning rate on the Aspire).

But for final charges between $350 and $600, what’s the right order to place the charges in? I think my preference is to put $350 on the Ascend and receive $70 back, then put the remainder on the Aspire, because the remaining cardmember year Aspire credit will remain available for later use.

But there’s a good argument, an argument I might even agree with depending on the day, that the Aspire resort credit is available at such a limited footprint of properties that maximizing that credit when we do have the opportunity is a much higher priority than triggering a piddling 20% discount, the kind of discount I can beat 365 days a year through manufactured spend.

Sound off in the comments if you feel strongly about it one way or the other.