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News and notes from around the interweb:
- 1500 United miles for online shopping
- Hilton is miscalculating the points required for 5th night free awards
- Time to re-status match from Hyatt to MGM M life Rewards
- Some folks are being offered 50,000 Ultimate Rewards points for depositing $100,000 with Chase
Copyright: jetcityimage / 123RF Stock Photo - Air France KLM Flying Blue appears to be offering status matches to air berlin and Etihad elites through a German service email. Unclear whether Flying Blue accounts need to list a German address or not. Note that this doesn’t get you Delta lounge access on wholly domestic US itineraries, but it does get you access to (very expensive) Air France first class awards. Notable because Flying Blue status matches, while available occasionally, are relatively rare.
- American Express Business Platinum increases the cap on points rebated when spending directly on travel from 1 million to 3 million points per year
I don’t believe that the Hilton calculations on the fifth night free are errors – I believe that this was intentionally done to further devalue this benefit.
To clarify my above statements – I believe that the instances where all nights are priced up to the maximum are how the T&Cs are meant to be interpreted, which is obviously a significant devaluation of the award.
@Mike That’s what I believed too when I first wrote about this last week but that doesn’t explain why it isn’t happening at all properties.
It also doesn’t explain why, as I showed in the post Gary kindly linked too, I found a number of randomly selected properties where the cost for a 5 night award is lower than it should be under any of the explanations we’ve been given so far (cheaper than if the old methodology was still in play, cheaper than if Hilton was upping the cost of all the non-free nights and cheaper than if Hilton was simply charging the regular nightly rate for the non-free nights).
SPG also has 5th night free benefit and for years they were dropping the lowest night cost out in cost calculations. So let’s say the cost is 16K/night for the first 3 nights and 20K/night for the last 2 (because of a high season). Then SPG math will be to charge 16Kx2+20KX2=72K but not 16Kx3+20K=68K. It would be nice to drop the price of the last night instead!
Regarding HHonors calculations in the links provided, I have searched for Capital Hilton in DC from June 7 to 12: without logging into my Diamond account and the price was 60K/night. This is where the problem is: for longer stays HHonors is charging the maximal point rate for each day in the reservations. In the example above the room type is the same.
Notably, booking the flexible rate for June 7-12 using money is still slightly cheaper than making two reservations for June 7-10 and June 10-12 even though the nightly rate more than doubles between these two dates. Thus, this is only the problem for reward nights.