Do you want to make sure that the Club Points sitting in your account that are not being used for an upcoming reservation have the longest expiration period possible? In this article, we’ll be showing you how to work around the rules of Hilton’s online booking system, and use their online booking dashboard in a manner that forces the system to use the exact block of points you want to use for each reservation you make. In doing so, this ensures that you have the most amount of time possible to plan your vacations before having to deal with your Club Points expiring.
Learning How Hilton’s Reservations System Allocates Club Points To Reservations
When you book your stays with Hilton through their owner dashboard, the reservation system will utilize a specific block of Club Points to finalize your booking. The Club Points that are used for your reservation could be Club Points from your current use year, or borrowed Club Points from your next use year.
Usually, Hilton’s reservation system will tend to use the Club Points that will expire soonest, but the determination of what points will be expiring soon is done at the time you make the reservation. However, sometimes owners will need to cancel a reservation, and end up with Club Points in their account that expire quickly, while having other reservations that are using Club Points that won’t expire as quickly as the Club Points that were just returned.
What Is “Shuffling” Club Points?
It’s possible that you booked a reservation earlier in the year, which used the points that had the earliest expiration dates at the time you booked the reservation, but now you need to cancel that reservation. This would free up those earlier expiring points, which ideally could be “shuffled” into another existing reservation to ensure any Club Points left in your account have an expiration date that is as far as possible away.
So, after canceling your HGV reservation, we may have a block of Club Points that come from our cancellation which would expire before the points that are tied up in our other reservations. Essentially what we want to end up doing is shuffle the point usage around so that those existing reservations use up the points expiring first, leaving the later expiring points for other bookings.
In this scenario, simply canceling and rebooking the reservation you want to shuffle old points into could mean you end up losing a hard-to-get reservation that is currently not available, which means canceling and rebooking is not an option.
Let’s explore how we can coax Hilton’s reservation system to shuffle our points with a sooner expiration date into an existing reservation.
How To Shuffle Club Points
Starting Point
I receive 14000 ClubPoints per year for my ownership. Here is what the summary of points would look like for the 2021 use year:
I currently have several reservations, some using Regular 2021 ClubPoints (because I have less than my annual allotment of 14000 listed as available) and some using Saved ClubPoints 2020/2021 (HGVC auto saved 2020 use year points into 2021). But because I canceled a reservation that was using Saved ClubPoints after I had already booked additional reservations that used my Regular 2021 ClubPoints, I now find myself with 700 remaining Saved ClubPoints from the 2020/2021 bucket, while I have already “Borrowed” 700 from 2021 buckets.
I want to do this because I can save my 2021 Club Points into 2022, but I will not be permitted to do that to the points in the Saved ClubPoint 2020/2021 bucket. I have to use those or move them to RCI, which I would rather not do. If you want to move points to RCI anyway, then perhaps this shuffle is not something you need to do.
What We Want To Accomplish
I would like one of my existing reservations to use up the 700 points currently in the Saved ClubPoint 2020/2021 bucket. Thus freeing up and adding those points back into my 2022 ClubPoint bucket.
What To Do in Order to Accomplish The Shuffle
Select an existing Changeable reservation that is using the points you want to shuffle, either Regular ClubPoints or Borrowed ClubPoints. In my example I have a 2021 reservation that is actually using Borrowed 2022 points.
Select that reservation and change it by subtracting a single day at the beginning or end of your reservation. Completed that change to the reservation. Then go into that reservation change process again and change it back to your original dates. Even if no other units are available, leaving a single day will NOT be able to be booked by someone else, because of the two-day minimum.
In the example below. Original 7 night reservation was changed to 6 nights. Confirm it. Then on the same reservation, was change it back again to the 7 nights.
Once the reservation is changed twice, when you go back to your listing of points the points are reshuffled, as the 2nd time the reservations was changed, the first points expiring were used, thus freeing up the 2021 points.
Limitations
This won’t work with non-changeable reservations, and it won’t work with 3 night reservations as that in the minimum amount of nights.
Glitches
There has been known to be occasional glitches, where the system will just not shuffle the points. In those cases it is always best to just call the Vacation Counsellor.
Learn More About Hilton Grand Vacations
In this guide, we have covered how to use the Hilton Grand Vacations Member Dashboard to shuffle points into existing reservations to ensure whatever points you have available have the longest shelf life and most flexibility to use. We hope you found this guide helpful!
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