Hello from Versailles! DF & I are at the Waldorf Trianon Palace and it's been amazing. We did a bike ride on the palace grounds, picnic in the gardens, various palace tours, a guided food & wine tour around the city, and last night we had dinner at the Gordon Ramsay restaurant, which was great.
We booked a total of 6 nights in the following configuration:
Night 1, Wednesday 5/22: King Pavilion Room with Garden View, 125K HHonors points (cash rate $416)
Night 2, Thursday 5/23: King Pavilion Room with Garden View, 125K HHonors points (cash rate $416)
Night 3, Friday 5/24: King Pavilion Room, FREE - Amex Hilton Aspire Weekend Night Certificate #1 (cash rate $571)
Night 4, Saturday 5/25: King Pavilion Room, FREE - Amex Hilton Aspire Weekend Night Certificate #2 (cash rate $571)
Night 5, Sunday, 5/26: King Pavilion Room, FREE - Amex Hilton Biz Weekend Night Certificate (cash rate $531)
Night 6, Monday, 5/27: King Terrasse Suite, 495K HHonors points (cash rate $2,300)
You can see we spent a total of 745,000 points on this trip.
- 225K in HHonors account to start
- 150K bonus from Hilton Aspire
- 125K bonus from Hilton Biz
- 393K points from all required spending
= 893K points, so we have 148K left just from this particular run
I should mention that I'm not a big Hilton cheerleader. I'm a Hyatt person & my ranking of major hotel chains is Hyatt > Hilton > IHG > Bonbon. HOWEVER...
The Aspire made it almost too easy to earn the needed points... we went away one weekend, spent $450 on room/meals/incidentals & came back with 16.3K points (9K from Hilton, 6.3K from Amex, and a 1K bonus). That said, now that we're done earning the points we need, this card is not going to be in heavy rotation. It's not really worth using unless you're chasing a bonus (or buying a house with plenty of expenses to spread around on various CCs). But, it will stay in my "collection" because I think we can make the free night & resort credit work to more than cancel out the AF. That's saying something considering the AF on this card is $450, whereas the Bloobloo card has an AF that's about 25% of that and it's probably getting the axe.
The Monday night 495K rate sounds like a lot of points but the Fêtes Galantes (fancy dress event) is tonight & we booked the day it was announced, making it a fabulous rate for that particular room. (I am currently getting my hair done - the stylist & I have exhausted our ability to communicate with each other, thus I am writing about churning on my phone.) You cannot see the redemption rate online so you're at the mercy of the phone agent. We did spend some time wondering if that was a "mistake" rate of sorts (or at least booked before the system updated for the special event), and if we were going to wake up & find that booking knocked out, but it held... & when I wanted to add Tuesday night in a "regular" room, they quoted me some ridiculous rate around 525K that I posted about here. No thanks.
We decided to gamble that they would leave us in the same room for the first five nights even though the certificate did not entitle us to the same view category. As HHonors Diamond (thanks to Aspire!) I am eligible for a complimentary upgrade & we thought it would be easy enough to not take it on the GV room, but to request it on the non-GV room, thus making it so we didn't have to move. If we had to move, we would have been okay with that, but it was worth a try.
They didn't give us the upgrade we requested.
They just put us in the suite all week.
& we are beside ourselves, feeling as though we have our own private palace. We never want to say "au revoir" now!
LOOK AT THIS VIEW!
I will post more pics in the hotel review thread at some point.
As an aside, there are many people who seem to come here to take pictures with rented luxury cars & then drive away. Not sure what is going on there. It made us laugh because you just know some of those pictures are going up on Instagram like “it’s so hard to be this rich; stay tuned for my next adventure where I try to humble & find myself by begpacking through Southeast Asia #blessed” One clown was even holding up the keys & a piece of paper like he just bought the car. Dude, we watched you reposition that car for 10 minutes so the rental tag wouldn’t be in the picture. Never believe what you see on social media!!!