We have a 5 day break over Memorial Day Weekend in 2019 and are heading up to Vermont for 5 nights, Burlington to be exact. There are many nature related and recreational activities that we plan to take advantage of up there. I am excited to go this far north in Vermont.
Luckily, we can base in Burlington at the Hilton Burlington right on Lake Champlain. It looks perfect.
The good news is that we were able to use Hilton Honors points for the stay. Having recently taken advantage of an offer for Rob for 75,000 Hilton Honors points and then transferring those points to my account via points pooling, I was able to accumulate most of what we needed for the 5 night stay. I was about 20,000 points short, but I easily transferred 10,000 American Express Membership Rewards points into my Hilton Honors account which yielded me the additional 20,000 points I was short. (Amex pts transfer to Hilton Honors at a 1 : 2 exchange rate now).
So after the transfer, I was able to book 2 rooms for 5 nights at the hotel for 50,000 Hilton Honors points per night. The fifth night is free when you book on Hilton Honors points, so the rooms for 5 nights were 200,000 Hilton Honors points each for a total of 400,000 points.
The rooms would have been about $320 per night, at the member rate, for a total of $1600. (You do not get the fifth night free when you pay for a stay with money.)
Recent valuations peg these points at about .6 of a cent per point. So in terms of the value of these points, I used $2,400 in value for rooms worth about $3,200. (400,000 * .01 * .6). I think I did pretty well! Booking the hotel with the fifth night free definitely helps. Not that I always care, sometimes free is more worth it to me even if I lose a bit in value.
Now hopefully we won’t lose any of those days over Memorial Day Weekend due to snow.
