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Hotel Rewards: Naughty or Nice?

May 19, 2006 at 3:55 PM | 0 Comments

A reader wrote in to say that Hilton had downgraded his Hilton Honors status from Gold to Silver as part of their rewards system change. And our friend was not too happy.

I just received a surprise the other day when I logged onto hilton.com and discovered I was all of a sudden a Silver Honors member instead of a Gold member. I knew I was well above the number of stays to keep me as a Gold for the rest of the year so I went back to the site and checked the rating criteria. Sure enough, the required stays for the year had gone from 10 to 16 for Gold, and I was somewhere in between.

Nice of them to tell me. Oh, and I logged in again today and got a popup telling me I'd "achieved" Silver level, so I guess they decided to tell me after all.

Hilton is not having a good day. First the wireless goof in Vienna and now this.

But they are not alone. Starwood is also considering changing up its awards program (i.e. how many Preferred Guests points will it take to get a free night.)

Our pals at the View from the Wing are experts on the rewards programs at different hotels and they chalk it up mostly to rising hotel prices but it's worth a look if you ever wanted to see how these hotel rewards programs operate.

Related Stories:
· A Theory on Why Starwood is Considering Devaluing its Awards [View from the Wing]