Hilton Honors
Hilton Honors is one of my favorite hotel loyalty programs. I’ve stayed at many Hiltons around the world and their points still continue to give me immense value in spite of devaluations over the years.
Also, if I need more points, I have a lot of options. They’re very easy to earn. You can sign up for one of the Hilton cards from American Express and earn 100,000 points on the basic no-annual fee Hilton Honors Card and 150,000 points on the Hilton Ascend and Aspire cards. Also, you can transfer Membership Rewards points to Hilton Honors at a ratio of 1:2.
Transferring Points
You can transfer points to other members. I tried using this functionality and had an intriguing experience.
There are different categories that exist for moving your points around. You can select one of the options depending on your goals.
Pooling Points
You can pool points with up to 10 other members without having to pay any additional fees.
Transferring points to other Members
Since I wanted to transfer points for an upcoming stay, I started by doing a sample points transfer of 5,000 points in order check whether it works fine. Please note that you can only transfer points at a 1:1 ratio. The points have to be in increments of 1,000 points.
Timeline of Events
- I transferred the points and got the standard email with a confirmation that my request was received.
- Even after over 12 hours, I still didn’t see any points transfer completed.
- I woke up the next day and still nothing had changed even after 24 hours. I decided to call Hilton Honors to check what was happening. What was odd was that no activity was showing up on my Hilton account history, but points had been debited from the account. Given all the breaches happening off late, I was a bit worried.
- I waited for a few more hours and called again. This time, the phone rep confirmed with me that both my friend and I met the requirements as per the terms and conditions mentioned above. However, even the rep didn’t have a clear answer as to why the transaction history was still not showing up on my account. That made me initially wonder whether my points had just vanished. I’m still not seeing activity records show up on my account even after three weeks of having transferred the points.
- Later during the day, I confirmed with the person I’d transferred my points to. Thankfully, the points had been transferred successfully!
The Pundit’s Mantra
I’m glad that the points had actually gone through and that there was no fraud related issue. However, I’m still intrigued as to why there’s still no record showing up in my transaction history. The actual transfer took over 24 hours and I got an email confirmation once the transfer was complete. If you intend to transfer Hilton points to other members, then please take note. For a few hours or even a few days, you may be stuck in a situation where points will be debited from your account but no record will show up.
Have you used the lucrative points pooling/transfer option with Hilton Honors? Have you had transaction history show up correctly after transferring points to other Hilton members? Let us know in the comments section.
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Hilton aren’t managing their points system. It’s managed by an awful points.com
When you buy, pool or transfer points between friends or members of your family, transactions routinely got stuck in their system and sometimes for weeks. Hilton customer support have no visibility whatsoever into what’s happening on the points.com side. After a few days, if you insist Hilton support might open a case with points.com and resolution might take a month or two. Points.com is routinely blocking transactions due to false positive triggers. It’s a hot mess and Hilton should solve it asap as it’s a BAD customer service.
Have you had any of transactions blocked or stuck? Are they visible now in your account?
I’d say that a little attention by Hilton’s IT department is in order here. Hilton can’t afford to alienate those of us who are loyal to the brand. Doesn’t matter who is “managing” HHonors, Hilton needs to get in there for some investigation and repair.
I’ve been loyal to Hilton for a long time as well. I hope this is fixed soon.
We routinely use this option to transfer points between my wife and I and it rarely happens within 24 hours of the transfer activity. I just looked out of curiosity and also have no transaction history that would indicate that points have been moved in or out of either account. It’s a little nerve wracking when you the points are in limbo, but it’s always been made right in the end.
Yes, it’s a bit odd that’s it’s happening to a lot a people. Thanks for the data point! Hopefully it’s an IT issue that they cab plug soon.
Perhaps related to the outage of Googles cloud functionality a few days ago?
That could be one possibility, but I haven’t read any report about this.
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