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My Review of Hampton London Waterloo
As we’ve mentioned earlier, Hilton is running a very generous promotion for day use rooms. It also happens that I need to spend a few more quid to redeem my Amex cashback deal, so I was looking to spend a few hours in a London Hilton hotel.
The cheapest option in London is Hilton Hyde Park, for a ridiculously low price of £40. However I needed to spend £44 to trigger the Amex offer, So in the end I chose the (slightly more expensive) Hampton Waterloo hotel which is more convenient for me as well.
The hotel is around five-minutes’ walk to the Waterloo train station. Although there’s not much to do in the area, it’s a good base to explore London due to the transport links, and its proximity to the Thames may be preferable to some.
As London is in lockdown and the hotel is only running with skeleton staff, the entrance is closed and you need to buzz the get in. The ground floor / reception area looks quite new and functional.
I was assigned a Queen Room with City View, which is sort of an upgrade due to my Diamond status.
As you can expect from a Hampton hotel, the room is a bit on the small and basic side. It should offer you what you need though.
The bathroom is shower-only.
There isn’t much of a view, but you do see a bit of the City 🙂
Since I only stayed a few hours in the room I don’t have much more to say. The hotel and its rooms are definitely adequate, but from my previous observations it’s not really a lot cheaper than its full-service counterparts in London (Hiltons and Doubletrees). You probably prefer to stay somewhere else as long as you have status.
My points (including the 10,000 bonus) and two night credits posted OK a couple days later.
10,000 bonus points for booking Hilton’s day room
Hilton is the pioneer in opening day-use bookings – their system has long supported booking day rooms directly. As the competition in this market is heated, Hilton has revamped this idea and come up with something new.
The new scheme around day rooms is called WorkSpaces, and you can access its page here. The idea is nothing new – you have a room from 9am to 5pm, earn points and stay credits, and elite benefits such as room upgrade / lounge access also apply.
Until the end of March 2021, you’ll be awarded 10,000 bonus points for the first day-use booking completed during the promotion period. Note that only hotels in the UK, USA and Canada are participating.
Here are some cheap London hotels:
- Hampton by Hilton London Waterloo £48
- Hart Shoreditch Hotel London £56
- Hilton London Hyde Park £52
- Hilton London Olympia £40
- Hampton by Hilton London Ealing £42
And I expect hotels in other regions to offer even lower rates.
To book, simply visit Hilton’s website and select the same check-in and check-out date. Note that some hotels call the rate simply “Day Use” and others “Workspaces – Day Use”. To be safe I’d recommend to book the latter.
Promotions such as the current double-up should also apply. In theory you won’t get night credit though, but it depends how the hotel logs your stay.
According to the terms – “you must have received this offer directly from Hilton Honors”. It might be a targeted offer, but I’ll book a stay anyway and see how it goes.
5000 bonus points per Conrad / Waldorf Astoria stay
Yes, another (reincarnated) Hilton targeted promotion…
To sign up visit this page. You earn 5000 bonus points for each stay at Conrad or Waldorf Astoria hotels, as long as it meets the two-night minimum requirement.
I’ve successfully registered to it and also the other “5000 bonus points for two stays” offer. Stackable with the current double points promotion, it’s great news for those who can travel…
Another Hilton bonus points offer (25K points)
We wrote about three resurrected Hilton targeted bonus points offers a few days ago. A reader failed all three registrations but reported to have received a different version.
The landing page of the other offer is here. Stay at least four nights within 90 days and a bonus of 25,000 points will be deposited to your account. Again it’s a targeted offer and considering how rewarding it is, I don’t think many people will qualify.
It’s sad that UK and Europe are going into another lockdown, and I doubt many people will have a chance to use these offers at all.
Hilton targeted promotions: Up to 10K bonus points after two stays
Hilton ran a campaign of targeted promotions last year. There were different versions of it but anyhow you’d get a bonus after two stays. It looks like the offers are reincarnated into a new life form this year!
There are three different offers:
- Stay twice, get 10,000 bonus points
- Stay twice, get 7,500 bonus points
- Stay twice, get 5,000 bonus points
I’d recommend signing up from top to bottom, in case you can only register to one of them. I only qualify for the last one:
And I can see it under My Offers already on Hilton’s website:
Note that the fine print stills say December 31, 2019, but there are reports of successfully getting the bonus already so it should work. Good luck!
Hilton points have just become much more valuable – but only in the US
Since the introduction of dynamic award pricing, Hilton’s Honors programme has become much less interesting, or at least to some of us. With the removal of publicised award chart, Hilton has devalued its awards quietly a few times since, and it is more and more difficult to get outsized value when spending points.
A Hilton’s representative has just posted a thread on Flyertalk, talking about lowering down the award pricing at many US hotels. At the first glance, I almost discarded it as a useless piece of propaganda – given its dynamic nature, of course the award price will drop as the cash price has crashed in the country.
However, after I spent some time digging around, there are genuinely some great news here!
[Better Award Exchange Rate]
Hilton’s dynamic award pricing works out as follows: given a hotel’s best flexible rate (BFR), an award night costs roughly 10,000 points for every $50 charged. The rate is slightly different per region and hotel, but it’s largely the same globally.
Surely there’s also a cap that applies to each hotel, which takes effect when the cash rate is very high, but let’s not talk about it here.
The exchange rate seems to have become a lot more attractive in some US cities. Take Orlando for example, for a Saturday night in October you could easily get $60 of value out of 10,000 points.
You may think the difference is not huge and could just be an acceptable error. However, if you move the date to March next year, some hotels are priced at almost $100 per 10,000 points!
[More Standard Awards]
Although points almost have a fixed value now, Hilton didn’t go fully revenue-based like Accor. Usually you can only redeem points for standard rooms (Standard Award), and for better rooms the awards (Premium Award) are priced much worse.
It looks like many US hotels are very flexible with the definition of “standard rooms” now. Again in Florida, Hilton Fort Lauderdale Beach Resort has opened up their Junior Suite for redemption:
Although to the fair its fare difference to the basic room type is small. (Again, you are getting $87 per 10,000 points which is amazing)
In Seattle, if you have a look at the Charter Hotel, the four lowest room types are priced differently both in cash and in points.
However, if you click through, all four room types are Standard Awards. Not only does it mean it offers a better exchange rate, but also the “5th night free” benefit applies in this case for Hilton Silver members and above.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find anything similar in Europe. I guess US is being hit by the pandemic very hard at the moment so Hilton is trying to experiment something new here. Hopefully, at some point it gets rolled out to the rest of the world.
Accor (and Hilton) is now selling day-use rooms
It’ not uncommon for hotels to sell day-use rooms, although most online hotel booking platforms don’t support reserving it. As the epidemic is not going away anytime soon and people are looking for a place to work other than their home, Accor has finally seen the opportunity and got around to add this feature to its site.
As you can see here, you can now book Accor’s day-use room on this dedicated webpage. Rules are:
- Check-in at 9am
- Check-out at 6pm
- You earn Accor points for the spend
However, prices aren’t cheap – I find them more expensive than booking an overnight stay!
Accor isn’t the first hotel group to provide this functionality. In fact, you are able to book a day use room with Hilton directly since a long time ago. Just select the same check-in and check-out date on their website or app:
You always get the stay credit and points for your stay, but night credit can be hit-and-miss – you’re not staying overnight anyway. Elite benefits also apply, so you will get room upgrade and (for Diamond members) executive lounge access.
Which hotel groups are rolling over your night credits this year?
All hotel chains have already applied some sort of Covid-19 policies at this point. For their loyalty programmes, this started with the extension of elite status and different kind of vouchers.
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