The Hilton Honors loyalty program has a benefit that can prove useful for long stays. The benefit is that you can get a fifth night free stay when you book with points. This means that you are getting a 20% discount on your stay with points.
The only requirement to take advantage of this benefit is that you need to pay for the full stay with Hilton Honors points. You can't use points and cash. And, you can't do this with cash.
If you have enough points to book a room for five nights, then they will simply deduct it from your points balance.
If you do not have enough points to book a room for five nights, you can buy the remaining points to make up the difference. You want to avoid buying too many points as it raises the cost of your points.
Hilton Honors points are valued at around $0.006 per point. Whereas buying points will cost $0.01 per point. It dilutes your savings by buying too many points. On occasion, there are promotions in which you can buy points for $0.005 each.
We were able to book five nights in New Orleans, Louisiana using points from the Hilton Honors Business card welcome bonus for signing up. The spend requirement is $3000 in the first three months to get 130,000 Hilton Honors points.
However, our stay would cost 160,000 points based on 40,000 points per night. We were 17,000 points short of the requirement. So, we bought 20,000 points for $200.
We could have waited another month to earn the points from our spending with the credit card. However, that runs the risk of our room being booked by somebody else.
Once you receive your folio after your stay, the nightly rate gets adjusted to average out over five nights. Rather than charge 40,000 points for four nights with a free night, you will see each night charged at 32,000 points.
This is why we say that it's a 20% discount. Your point cost went from 40,000 points to 32,000 per night, or something similar depending on how much a night costs in that particular hotel.
More Points On The Way
Of course, this method of travel finance builds on itself. We will be driving to New Orleans. Road trips are ideal for the Hilton Honors Business card as it pays 6 points per dollar on dining and fuel, which will be our other major expenses on this trip.
In addition, by charging room incidentals to the card during our stay, we would earn 12 points per dollar.
As you can more or less calculate, it gets easy to earn points for more hotel stays when you use the Hilton Honors credit cards to pay for travel.
It is precisely because travel is expensive that points can quickly add up using the spending category multipliers. In a year of spending, it is possible to accumulate enough points for a five night stay, or longer. This is especially easy with business expenses, which tend to be higher than personal expenses.
We look forward to sharing our trip to New Orleans.