Hilton Hotels have become a partner of TopCashBack, one of the two leading cashback sites in the UK.
According to the headline rate you will get 5% back, but in reality it could be worth around 12% – or even more!
The key relevant and also interesting bit to this is that the cashback you earn from Hilton bookings via TopCashBack can ONLY be paid to you as Tesco Clubcard points.
TCB already allow you to send up to £50 of your cashback to your Tesco Clubcard account each year, and will even pay a 5% bonus on that during the transfer.
The good news is that your Hilton cashback will NOT count against this £50 limit. So you can send £50 a year, plus ALL of your Hilton cashback. (It is not clear if the Hilton cashback will similarly get a 5% bonus on itself during the transfer!)
Now Tesco Clubcard points convert to Avios at a rate of 250 > 600 Avios. So effectively 1 clubcard point, will convert into 2.4 Avios, and you will get 5 clubcard points per £ spent on Hilton bookings which converts to 12 Avios per pound!
If you value an Avios point at 1p (for example) that would be the equivalent of12p in the pound (12%) cashback.
And this is all further assuming you do NOT save the tesco points up for the occasional Tesco CC > Avios conversion bonuses.
Virgin Atlantic Flying Club
Virgin are also Tesco Clubcard partners, so you could convert £2.50 of clubcard points into 625 VS FC miles. Therefore getting 12.5 Virgin miles per Hilton booking £.
And right back to Hilton H Honours (or IHG)
The further interesting bit – especially if you are someone who doesn’t fly much but does stay in hotels, is that Virgin flying club is one of the few airline programmes with a conversion route OUT to hotel points, allowing you to convert 10k Virgin Atlantic miles into 20k Hilton HHonours points.
At 12.5 flying club miles per £, you would reach the 10k necessary after spending just £800 on Hilton bookings. Additional 5k multiples of HH can be converted at the same time and the same rate, but you need to reach 10k to do this conversion from Virgin FC to Hilton. Giving you a final effective cashback of 25 HH/£ – before bonuses.
You can also go 10k Virgin to 10k IHG Rewards Club/Priority Club, but at 1:1 the rate is even worse.
Conclusion
If you want to signup to TopCashBack please consider using my referral link.
But by way of a conclusion it is worth saying again as always: Never rely on cashback, it is not guaranteed and even when it does work it takes time. If you would suffer without the cashback from a deal, then don’t do the deal, go for a cheaper upfront option.
Hi, It may also be worth noting that Marriott is available for cash back at both TCB and Quidco.
Hi Clive, thanks for your comment.
Personally I’m not a huge Marriott stayer myself at present, but you are indeed quite right they are on the main cashback sites which is worthy of note if you play the points games (and therefore need to book on official hotel sites).
I’m also confident that IHG, who I am currently chasing around the remaining cashback which offer them, will come back to the main UK cashback sites – at some point.
My reason for flagging Hilton here was two fold.
Firstly because they have been absent from the ‘above board’ cashback sites for a while. The old bmi (airline) estore was the only good/officially-sanctioned route for quite a while that I can recall – but that went with the demise of bmi.
Secondly because of the curious way Hilton cashback has now been implemented at TCB, with Tesco Clubcard as the only payout.
While the implementation of Hilton might look restrictive, it is actually brilliant. Many would take all of their cashback as Tesco Clubcard points if they could, which offer them a chance to buy avios at 2.4 per clubcard point (or 240 to the pound).
Indeed, with an effective rate of 12%, I’m now much more ready to consider Hilton stays at the expense of IHG while they are messing people around at present.
With the demise of 2-4-1 rate at IHG (it seems to have largely stopped working at my booking horizon), I’m now going for ClubCarlson with their ParkInn, Radisson brands (also on the cashback sites) for my 2-night stays when I can.
Also worth noting Virgin Atlantic’s eshop has always had Hilton on too…
Hi Chris, thanks for letting me know about that! I’ve historically not been much of a Virgin person due to their (previous) lack of any shorthaul services and lack of longhaul destinations that made any sense for me personally. You also do raise an important general point: In the same way that it is wise to stay on top of T&C changes in the programmes you use, it is also certainly always good to reconsider schemes you may have previously discounted, just in case they may now have something you would benefit from.