How I redeemed 50,000 Hilton points for a concert

Introduction

You remember that FU points post I wrote a few weeks ago?  Well, this was my first points redemption for non-travel.  I had gotten my Hilton Diamond card in the mail a few months ago and in the brochure, it mentioned something like, “more ways to use your points – redeem them for concerts.”  Sure enough, I went out to http://auction.hhonors.com/, browsed around, and lo and behold, found a concert in Seattle – the New Kids on the Block concert.  First off, I’m not really a HUGE NKOTB fan, but I did want to see Boyz II Men as well as Paula Abdul.  Secondly, I wanted to learn about the process more than anything else.  When would my tickets be delivered?  Where would they seat me?  Can I flip the tickets?

Winning the bid

The bid I won wasn’t an ‘auction;’ it was more of a BUY IT NOW with a quantity of 1.  So that’s what I did.  I paid 50,000 Hilton points for 2 tickets to the June 2017 concert back in March 2017.  

Ticket Delivery

I received an email on May 10 with the PDF tickets attached for the June 7th concert, so almost a month ahead of time.  The PDF had a blank where the names could have been.  Granted, I probably could have resold these, but that’s against the terms and conditions, but if you wanted to give the tickets to friends and family to go, I don’t know how the concert or the program would even know.

Seats

The seats were actually pretty good.  We were the 13th row up in section 115.  The tiny blue dot is where we sat.  Also a non-zoomed in picture of our view below as well.  The row had something like 20 seats.  There were 2 people to our right and like 12 empty seats to our left.  I didn’t ask the people next to us how they got their tickets, but I should have.  Mid-way through the concert, a bunch of random people came and stood in the empty seats.  I assumed those were their seats, but my wife told me they were just seat-hopping(?)

Conclusion

I checked on TM and SH and the seats were going for about $100 each, so let’s say I got $200 of value for the 50,000 points, which is the typical .4c of value per HH point.  However, I rationalized it by saying it only cost me $100 to MS those 50,000 points, thus I was paying $100 for the pair of seats.  A great use of FU points in my book.

As for the concert itself, I really enjoyed Boyz and Paula Abdul.  However, I realized I only knew like 3 NKOTB songs – “Summertime,” “Hanging Tough,” and “Step.”  That was it.  My wife got impatient half way through their 1+ hr set and we left after hearing 3 songs we didn’t recognize.  We left before their final song, which I think is “Tough,” so that we wouldn’t get hit with the Uber surge.