Scrambling to Use My Hilton Honors Free Night Reward

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Picture the excitement of receiving a free hotel night with no limitations! You can select from over 7,000 properties globally. This is the reward for reaching $15,000 in spending with the Hilton Honors Surpass AMEX. With Hilton’s complimentary night, you can treat yourself to a stay at nearly any hotel or resort (with only a few exceptions), as long as there’s a standard room available to book using award points.

In 2023, I had my wife Sharon use the Hilton Surpass AMEX as her everyday card. This would help us reach the $15,000 spending requirement, and we also earned extra points at supermarkets and gas stations. We reached the spending requirement in October and received an email that the free night was deposited in her Hilton Honors account.

Where To Use The Free Night?

The possibilities are endless, as Frequent Miler suggests 60+ properties to use the free night. However, many of the aspirational properties are not very close. Sure, I could stay for a free night in the Maldives or Bora Bora but those are places I’m not going to go for one night. That means I’d have to find a way to pay for the rest of the stay, not to mention the cost and time of getting to these destinations.

There are plenty of Hilton luxury properties in the US and I could plan a weekend getaway where I’d only need to pay for an additional night. In hindsight, I could have used our free night to stay at The Draper and saved 80,000 Hilton points. I didn’t use it for that stay because I had another use in mind.

We had booked a Virgin Voyages cruise from Barcelona and I needed a pre-cruise hotel. I had planned to use the free night we had in our account for that trip, so I held onto it. The cruise was only a month before the free night would expire, which was exactly 1 year from when it was deposited. I knew I was cutting it close, but at least I had a good use in mind for it.

Then we had to postpone the cruise to next year.

Scrambling To Find Anywhere To Use A Free Night

Now that we weren’t going to Spain, I had to find somewhere to use my “special” free night which I spent $15,000 on my credit card to get. To make matters worse, I only had a few months to use it and most of our travels were already scheduled.  We had no long weekends left and our remaining trips were to places without fancy hotels.

But I was eventually able to find a way to use our free night.

Using My Unlimited Free Night at Homewood Suites

I used our free night to book a room at Homewood Suites. It was not exactly the aspirational stay I imagined.

Before you start to say how stupid I was to “waste” my free night, remember this wasn’t the original plan. I only had a few months and needed to find a place that fit into our travel plans. I used the free night on a day when the hotel’s cash rate was $300 per night. That breaks down to earning an additional 2% back for the $15,000 we spent on the AMEX card.

Final Thought

While I didn’t maximize the value of the free night this year, it was still worth it. Of course, I could have done better, but when plans change at the last minute, you have to make adjustments. I’ve already lost out on a free night because I kept holding it for the maximum value. I learned my lesson, and using a free night for a less-than-perfect stay is better than not using it at all.

Now I can go back and figure out where we’ll use next year’s free night.

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