This rather odd tale involves a person who publicly denounces a frequent guest loyalty program for implementing what is considered a significant devaluation — only to have “some male” call and complain about the membership account of this person and causing it to be shut down.
Did a Blogger Cause This Person’s Account to Be Shut Down?
Easily the most controversial part of the new Hilton Honors program is the elimination of reward charts — something which Delta Air Lines did back in 2015 — and although the maximum points price of each hotel and resort property did not increase, the amount of points needed to redeem for award stays did quietly increase significantly at some hotel properties with no announcement. For example, according to this article written by Ric Garrido at Loyalty Traveler, “Eight hotels at 5,000 points six months ago are now 10,000 points per night.”
FlyerTalk member Kat007 claimed on Monday, March 12, 2018 that Another (Silent) Hilton Devaluation “happened within past week or so. Standard Reward doubled at a hotel I stayed and was planning to book again. I guess Hilton doesn’t think it has to announce any devaluation since there is no more categories? Not cool.”
Although fewer hotel properties than ever require only 5,000 Hilton Honors points for an award night, the claim by Kat007 of “No more 5K points hotels, all starts with 10K now” is clearly not true, as in the aforementioned article by Ric Garrido, at least two dozen properties still exist worldwide with that minimum redemption rate…
…but many authors of weblogs picked up on the perceived devaluation and had written articles about it — including several weblogs at BoardingArea.
Since then, the Hilton Honors account of Kat007 was allegedly closed for calling attention to the “sneaky devaluation” — but other members of FlyerTalk are not buying it…
…and then arose the possibility of an unidentified author of one weblog being the actual complainant — along with the allegation that FlyerTalk gives away personal information about its members: “That blogger is the male indeed, but I also didn’t use my real name, however, email address was exposed. But it is hard to believe that he did that, especially I had experienced my data exposure to Hyatt a couple of years ago and knew FT gives it away. But you definitely brought something I didn’t think about.” Kat007 did admit to writing to that person the next day on Tuesday, March 13, 2018.
Summary
This unusual story is still developing; but I initially find it difficult to believe that someone would complain about the membership account of a specific member of the Hilton Honors frequent guest loyalty program in order to have it shut down — unless there was a truly valid reason for doing so.
Despite the controversy involving the shutting down of membership accounts in relation to pooling Hilton Honors points — of which I was able to obtain an official response — I do not believe that the team at Hilton would indiscriminately shut down the account of a Diamond member unless clearly unscrupulous activity was committed by someone who egregiously violated the rules of the Hilton Honors program.
There must be significantly more to this story which has not been revealed in order for it to be logical — but I intend to follow up on this developing story if and when more information becomes available…
Photograph ©2015 by Brian Cohen.
