Eagle eyed Loyalty Lobby
caught a change from Hilton Honors that saw the loyalty program drop 11
of their partners as of June 15. This change was made quietly by Hilton
with no advance notice to members who may have been contemplating
converting some of their Honors points to one of these programs.
The eleven programs that have been dropped are:
Aeroflot, Alaska Airlines, Avianca, Amtrak, Finnair, Frontier
Airlines, Garuda Indonesia, Hawaiian Airlines, LATAM Airlines,
Philippine Airlines, & South African Airlines.
Granted, the transfer ratio from Hilton to their partners isn’t very
good and most likely the program did not see many transfers for these
partners but to do it without notice is wrong on Hilton’s part. In
reality the only reason to convert points from Hilton to an airline is
to either top off your airline account for an award or to use up a small
balance of Hilton points you would never use for an actual hotel stay.
I noticed last night that Aeroflot Bonus announced this to their members
on June 15th as well however they also note that Radisson Rewards will
no longer be a transfer partner as of June 17. The question will be is
it only Aeroflot that’s leaving Radisson or will there be more airlines
just like we saw from Hilton?