Using Our Hilton Honors Points to Book an AutoCamp Stay

We are at it again! This time, we are switching it up, and using our Hilton Honors we've been accumulating points (from using our American Express US credits cards) to book a trip we’ve been wanting to take since last summer, which is...

...a camping trip at Hilton's AutoCamp in Catskills NY.

I talked about AutoCamp in a previous post, and that we were looking to book this trip using points.

Well, we finally booked it!

How did we do it?

Well let’s learn how.

First thing we needed were Hilton Honors points. Sure we could buy them, or convert American Express (Amex) Membership Reward points into Hilton Honors points, but being that your cost per points (CPP) when booking hotels is not the best use of Amex points, we wanted to use Hilton Honors points that we EARNED, instead of buying them.

Since we had recently gotten Player 2, my wife, a Hilton Honors US American Express Aspire card, which I talked about in this recent post how she did that, (How Player 2 Got Their 1st US American Express Credit Card Instantly), we were in line for an amazing sign up bonus of 150K Hilton Honors Points upon hitting a spend of $6,000 in 6 months.

It took us about 3 months to hit this spending requirement, mainly as a result from a recent cruise that we just went on, where I knew we’d be making some purchases. So, upon hitting the minimum spend, and waiting almost a month, we were finally awarded the 150K Hilton Honors bonus points as part of signing up for the credit card.

We also had 90K Hilton honors points from the Amex US Hilton Honors no annual fee card that I had opened almost a year ago, and was saving these points for this exact trip.

Armed now with 240K points from credit card sign up bonuses, plus another 6K in points from spend on these credit cards, we were close the 280K points we needed to book 5 nights at Autocamp in Catskills NY, but still a little short.

Side note, one thing about booking hotel stays at Hilton Hotels via points is that its hard to confirm the exact amount of points you need for the hotel stay, compared to Marriott hotels, where it shows you the amount of points you need for each night, as the points needed are broken out by each night.

Hilton doesn’t’ do this, so its hard to confirm the exact amount of points you need for the entire trip, however, it seems that when you are searching for Hilton hotels using points, the first night points shown that you need are the points needed for each other night too.

One thing to also keep in mind, when you book a Hilton hotel stay using all points (and Marriott hotel stays too), the 5th night is free. Since each night it was telling me the cost was 70K points, we knew we only needed 280K points (70K x 4 nights), not 350K points.

Which means we still needed to get the remaining 34K points to book this trip.

But how?

Well at first we were going to just use cash when checking out for the difference, but that was telling us it was going to cost $637.91, to buy the remaining points needed.

This was because if you don’t use all points for the trip, then the 5th night isn’t free. So we would then be paying for the 5th night now.

We really didn’t want to have to pay anything out of pocket for this trip, so luckily at the time Hilton was offering a 100% bonus on points purchased, which allowed us to buy the remaining 34K points needed, to get us to the points required for 4 nights; the 280K needed (70K per night), plus the 5th night free since we used all points to book.

To do this, we purchased 17K points, and got 17K points as a bonus (the 100% bonus they were offering).

Total out of pocket for this 5 night hotel stay at Hilton AutoCamp in Catskills NY would’ve cost us almost $1,500 USD.

Instead it costs us just $170 USD!

Oh, and another little perk to credit card points. We recently received our 5 free night certificates for meeting the minimum spend on our Amex US Business Mariott Bonvoy card.

So we decided to use one of those free night certificates to split the drive to Catskill NY by making a stop in Pittsburgh, PA, in which we’ll be staying at the Oaklander Autograph Collection, and it only cost us the free night certificate; which is worth 35K points!

This would’ve cost us $370 USD for the night!

Not too bad eh? A 6 night hotel stay for practically nothing!

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THAT !!??