Hilton Honors to make lifetime status progress visible in 2020

January 15 2020

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3 min read

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Hotel elite status can make life easy for frequent travelers by offering perks including room upgrades, free breakfast, bonus points and more. Unfortunately status is a very fleeting thing: After a year of aggressive travel trying to qualify for it, the clock resets on Jan. 1 and you have to do it all over again.

This is why most hotel chains offer travelers who've been loyal for many years in a row the chance to earn lifetime elite status and never have to worry about requalifying.

Hilton Honors allows members to lock in top-tier Diamond elite status for life by meeting the following requirements:

Earn Hilton Diamond status for 10 (non-consecutive) years and complete one of the following:
Complete stays totaling 1,000 paid and reward nights OR
Earn 2 million base points

The problem is, there's no way for customers to track their progress towards lifetime status on the Hilton website or app — but that will be changing soon.

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It pays to be Diamond at the Hilton Moorea. (Photo by Darren Murph/The Points Guy.)

As reported by Loyalty Lobby, Hilton Honors plans to allow members to see their progress towards lifetime Diamond status some time in 2020.

Earning lifetime status is a marathon, not a sprint, and allowing customers to see their progress can help keep them engaged and encourage more long term loyalty. Hilton didn't even make its lifetime status requirements public until 2015, and it has some of the strictest requirements out there. Earning Diamond status for 10 years is relatively easy, as anyone can do that simply by opening up the Hilton Honors American Express Aspire Card which offers card holders automatic Hilton Diamond status (along with a hefty welcome bonus of 150,000 points after spending $4,000 on purchases in the first three months of account opening and other valuable perks).

The information for the Hilton Aspire Amex card has been collected independently by The Points Guy. The card details on this page have not been reviewed or provided by the card issuer.

Unfortunately there's no shortcut for the second set of requirements. 1,000 lifetime nights is much more than Marriott, which only requires 600 lifetime nights (and 10 years of Platinum status) to earn lifetime Marriott Platinum status. Meanwhile, earning 2 million base points would require you to spend $200,000 on eligible room rates and food and beverage charges, which is not an easy feat even for frequent business travelers.

Bottom line

While it's very easy to earn Hilton elite status by holding the right credit card(s), lifetime status is designed to be elusive and only available to customers who've been fiercely loyal for an extended period of time.

Adding a progress tracker will help Hilton's most loyal customers see where they stand with the chain, and might encourage some of them to make that final push to qualify for lifetime Diamond status.