Membership Rewards Now Worth 2 Hilton Honors Points
American Express has made a positive move for one of their Membership Reward transfer partners. Membership Rewards now transfer to Hilton Honors at a rate of 1 MR to 2 HH. They used to have a regular transfer rate of 1 to 1.5 with an occasional temporary increase of 1 to 2.
Summary
The real question is should we care? Probably not since Hilton points are worth less than a half cent each this transfer would put your value of MR points at $0.008. You would be better off buying Hilton gift cards with your MR points at $0.0085 a piece….don’t do this though :).
The only time I could see myself using this is if I were a few points short of a redemption. But with Hiltons points and the new pay with points slider you don’t even need to have all of the points for the room to use your points. Maybe if you were going for a 5th night free stay and needed a few thousand points to get over the hump to get there it would be beneficial.
If you find one of the unicorn redemptions out there where you get close to 1 cent per point then I could see the transfer being worth it. But these redemptions are getting harder and harder to find.
An interesting point is that you can essentially earn 9 Hilton points per dollar at the grocery store with a American Express Everyday Preferred card (earns 4.5 MR per dollar at grocery stores). That is 3 points per dollar better than the Surpass card. But most people put spend on the Surpass card in an attempt to earn Diamond status after $40,000 in spend.
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Conclusion
Outside of a few rare instances I don’t see this change moving the needle much at all for most. It is good to see Amex making a positive change with one of their partners. If only they would do the same thing with SPG!
Hat Tip to TPG
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