Questions and Answers

Hello,

Hope all is well.

I have a CSR card and am considering to apply for either a SPG or a Hilton Surpass card. I will be spending about $22k in August at a Hilton hotel. The rest would be normal activity spending on a daily basis. For SPG, I don’t have any big trips planned and would be normal activity spending on a daily basis. Which one would you recommend to apply? thank you.

hi helenal, are you trying to accrue Hilton points for a specific purpose? If not it might be worth it to use your expenses to meet the minimum spend for multiple cards. After you meet your minimum spend for the bonus on the Surpass you would earn 12 Honors points/$. At Ben’s valuation of 0.4/pt that’s a return of 4.8pts/$–arguably just about what you’d get with your CSR with more flexibility. Now lets say after you meet your $3k minimum spend on the Surpass you put the next $8k on the SPG business card. That should trigger your bonus and a total of 43,000 starpoints. At Ben’s valuation of 2.2cpp, that’s a 11.8% return per dollar. For the SPG personal the return is even better (17.6%) for the $5k min spend.

To sum up, unless you really want to bank Honors points, consider using this spending opportunity to meet the minimum spend on multiple cards to maximize your returns.

[QUOTE=”Gaurav, post: 27489, member: 79″]hi helenal, are you trying to accrue Hilton points for a specific purpose? If not it might be worth it to use your expenses to meet the minimum spend for multiple cards. After you meet your minimum spend for the bonus on the Surpass you would earn 12 Honors points/$. At Ben’s valuation of 0.4/pt that’s a return of 4.8pts/$–arguably just about what you’d get with your CSR with more flexibility. Now lets say after you meet your $3k minimum spend on the Surpass you put the next $8k on the SPG business card. That should trigger your bonus and a total of 43,000 starpoints. At Ben’s valuation of 2.2cpp, that’s a 11.8% return per dollar. For the SPG personal the return is even better (17.6%) for the $5k min spend.

To sum up, unless you really want to bank Honors points, consider using this spending opportunity to meet the minimum spend on multiple cards to maximize your returns.[/QUOTE]

Gaurav you make an interesting point regarding the return on investment for this spend and the use of valuations as a comparison tool. If he spends the entire amount on the Surpass card he’s going to get 339,000 points between the spend and the sign up bonus. At .04 per point that’s $1356 of value. But here is the problem. 5 nights at the highest cost Hilton property is 380000 to 280000 points. A more concrete example would be to look at an actual property so lets look at the Conrad Maldives in Sept. Its 76000 points or $760 dollars per night. A 5 night stay on points would be 304000 or $3800 if you pay cash which works out to 1.25 cents per point of value. But if he wants to go In January its still 76000 points per night but now the room rate is $1472 meaning to pay cash would cost $7360. This ups his return to 2.42 cpp.

So what’s my point? I really question the value of using Ben’s valuation figures as a method of comparison between earning options. Because how and when you intend to use those points can dramatically change their value. Helenal the question you need to ask yourself is what are you hoping to do with those points? Where do you want to redeem them most and for what. If your hope is to stay in an expensive hotel then I suspect at 12 points per dollar of spend your best bet is to put them on the Hilton Surpass. If its and airline ticket you want then Hilton points aren’t going to do you much good. The question is where do you want to go and how do you want to get there? Once you know that you can figure out the best path to achieving that goal but I would NOT use Ben’s valuation figures as your sole guide. They are a valid data point but they rest on assumptions that may or may not be true for you especially in this specific case.

[USER=2824]@Ski206[/USER], like I mentioned in your thread and in general bears repeating, yes everyone should do the math for their use case. However, it’s also hard to give advice given the limited information that is provided in a question and include a page full of caveats. In my response I ask if the OP is trying to accrue Hilton points for a specific purpose and include the qualifier about banking Hilton points in my conclusion. While a lot of people sign up for cards for specific purposes there are also plenty of people who sign up for cards speculatively to take advantage of spend opportunities or limited time sign up bonuses. In the latter situation you have to use some sort of valuation to compare outcomes.

Btw another interesting way to look at point values, especially if you MS a lot, is to examine cost to acquire instead of estimated redemption value. Once you factor in cc category bonuses, it can skew figures.