If you’re a Hilton Honors member, you probably know how important it is to get the most value from your points. That’s why it’s helpful to have a tool that lets you easily find availability at the best hotels for your budget.
The original Hilton award chart was a great tool for figuring out the minimum and maximum points needed to book a hotel room. However, that award chart isn’t available anymore.
Points Explorer
Hilton’s Points Explorer tool is a great way to search for a hotel stay with points. You can enter your desired price and location to get a list of hotels that meet your criteria.
One of the downsides to Hilton’s award chart is that the points required for a reward night can vary significantly depending on the season or demand. For example, a stay at the Waldorf Astoria Park City Utah can cost over 350,000 points during high peak winter months.
The good news is that a lot of the best travel credit cards earn rewards that can be used for multiple redemptions, including stays at Hilton properties.
The Hilton Honors program is free to join and you earn points every time you stay at a Hilton-branded hotel. You can also use your points to book event credits, which are useful for meeting room rentals, food and beverage, or other charges associated with an event.
Flexible Dates
Flexible Dates is a helpful tool for those who need to search for award flights on dates that aren’t quite set in stone. This allows you to change your travel plans without penalty and save a lot of money on tickets.
Google Flights is the most obvious option to start a flexible date search, but there are other sites that may be worth checking out. Kayak, for example, is a good choice if you have a specific range of trip lengths to search for.
This site’s flexible date search prioritizes price, showing the cheapest available fares, along with advance booking windows, before showing the dates on which those prices are available.
You can also choose to see a calendar view of all of the dates that fit into your budget, which is helpful for those who aren’t sure exactly when they want to fly. However, this option isn’t as comprehensive as some of the other ones on our list.
Points Calculator
Hilton has one of the best points-pooling features among hotel programs. It lets you pool your points with up to 10 friends and family members and transfer them all to a single account.
It also offers a simple point calculator, which lets you input three points redemption opportunities and associated ticket values to average your points value. It is a useful tool when assessing whether to redeem points or pay for the equivalent ticket outright.
To use the Points Calculator, enter a hotel rate per night and a Hilton Honors point value. It then estimates how many Hilton Honors points you will earn based on your hotel rate, elite status, seasonal promotion and co-branded credit card bonus earnings.
Taxes are not included in this calculation, but you do earn Hilton Honors points on lodging taxes paid if you have a co-branded credit card. Other factors that may influence your decision to book with points include MyWay hotel benefits and ineligible folio spending (i.e., non-room-rate folio charges at brands that do not award Hilton Honors base points for folio spending).
Award Chart
Award charts have historically been the easiest way to calculate the amount of miles you’ll need to fly your favorite destination. But, with many airlines now moving to dynamic awards pricing, the number of miles you’ll need to book your next trip can change significantly up until you actually book it.
This can make saving up for your next vacation an uphill battle, since you’ll never know how much more you’ll need until you actually book it. That’s why we recommend that you always consult an award chart to get a clear-cut estimate of what you’ll need before you start your travel planning.
Hilton no longer publishes an award chart, but it does offer a points search tool that purportedly shows the minimum price for a standard room at each hotel in the program. That tool is also filterable by brand, points price, and location.