New Benefit: Pool your Hilton Honors Points

Hilton now offers an exciting new option and benefit for members in their Honors loyalty program – points pooling!

Similar to household accounts with airlines, it allows you to pool your points with other Honors members. Unlike household airline accounts though, you aren’t limited to just family members that share your same address. You can also pool with friends, and family members that don’t live with you. In fact, you can pool with up to 10 other people.

If you are the one that everyone will be pooling the points with, you can receive up to two million points (and you can share up to 500,000 points per year).

You can share up to 500,000 points per year total, but it doesn’t have to be all with the same person. You can share 100,000 in a pool with Uncle Bob, 300,000 with Cousin Stephanie, and 1,000 with your friend Millie.

The sharing option would be especially brilliant for a group of folks wanting to go on holiday together that may not have enough points in one account, but plenty if they all pitch in. When it is time to make a reservation, it makes sense for the person with the highest status to do so as they’d receive the most perks.

Here’s how to get started –

To get your pool started, click here to be taken to the Hilton login page. Once you’re signed in, navigate to the “More Ways to Use Points” option on the left side of the screen. Click on the Pool Points option, and you’ll be taken to the points pooling area.

You don’t need to know any Hilton Honors member numbers in order to invite people to your pool, simply put in their names and email addresses.

Hilton will send an email to each person in the pool once you’re done filling in their info.

About 5 minutes after filling in the info for my test recipient, the other person received an email letting them know that the pool had been initiated and they had been invited.

Once confirmed by clicking the “pool your points” button in the email, you can then share points easily. A new account is not created for the pool, and you can pool in increments as small as 1,000 points. The website says to allow 24 hours before pooled points show up as having been transferred.

Note that new members of Hilton Honors need to be a member for at least 30 days and have a minimum of 1,000 points in order to join a pool.

You can used pooled points for room redemptions including Points + Money rewards, as well as non-room redemptions such as auction experiences.

Here’s a link to Hilton’s point pooling FAQs (scroll down to the middle of the page).

I love this new option to pool points, and see a ton of ways in which this could really come in handy. For example, an extended family could all pool their points to bid on and send Pop-pop to a golf experience for Father’s Day. Even though this offer has expired there are always new ones.

It also makes perfect sense for a couple of families going on vacation together to pool their points and then have the person with the Diamond status book hotel rooms for both of them.

How will you use the Hilton points pooling option?