Disclaimer – I highly recommend you DON’T DO THIS since it seems AMEX has been pretty shutdown happy of late. If you do go for it, proceed with caution.
Due to COVID, AMEX is doing this promo where from May 1 to July 31, 2020, your Hilton Aspire card now gets 12X at grocery stores. And all those points will go towards your Hilton Base Points towards Lifetime Diamond status.
I wasn’t sure where I was at with lifetime Diamond, so the Hilton Twitter team helped me pretty quickly:
This means I would need to spend $2,000,00 – 27,000 = $1,973,000 / 12 = only $164,417 to meet the base point criteria. Of course I would also need to keep the Aspire card for another 9 years of Diamond status (I thought I had 2-3 in the bag.) That’s around $50K of grocery spend a month, which isn’t horrendous. The issue of course is liquidating $165K of VGCs or whatnot. I think if you have the float for it or have a friendly liquidation avenue, it’s definitely doable.
I think my AMEX Hilton has about a $15K CL and I think going 3-4X on it isn’t that bad (I’ve heard from others doing higher,) but once again, don’t blame me if AMEX shuts you down. Worse case, I have 2MM of Hilton points. If you value Hilton at a realistic valuation of .4c per point (see random booking I looked at below,) that means you’re getting 4.8% return at grocery.
I think the 2MM points alone makes going for it worthwhile. So am I going to do it? Yeah I think so.
