Hilton Honors is running the last of this year’s point purchase promotion where members can earn up to 80% bonus on points who buy points through December 29, 2017.

A minimum of 20,000 points needs to be purchased to get the full 80% bonus, and 60% bonus will kick in on a purchase of 10,000 points. HHonors points are usually priced at USD 10 per 1,000 points. This means that you can buy a total of 144,000 Honors points (80,000 points + 64,000 bonus) for USD 800 bringing down the cost of each point bought to approximately 0.56 US cents/HHonors point. Here is a link to the promotion where you can buy the points.

Hilton was running the same promotion last year, where I had done a detailed analysis across all Hilton hotels in India to see if it was really worth buying Hilton points specifically for redemption purposes.

Although purchasing points under this offer do make sense for some Hilton properties like the Conrad Maldives where the cost for a reward night in December works out to USD 532 versus the retail average rate of USD 1100 upwards.

The math may also work if you are considering longer stays, where for a 5 nights stay you get the 5th night free, so the costs go down in those cases. Remember, Hilton now allows you to pool points from various accounts, so you could actually buy in different accounts if you are hit with the 80000 points limit per annum.

Bottomline

If you are thinking about purchasing points under this promotion then I’d suggest you first think about where you would like to redeem your points and work out the numbers. Buying points may make sense if you already have an existing balance and need to top up some points to redeem an award you have been considering.