Written by This is a guide based on my own recent experience on how to achieve Hilton Honors Gold Status by using their Status Match feature.
Eight months ago I wasn’t even collecting any hotel status or loyalty, I was mainly using hotel.com or booking.com to book all holidays. This all changed when we decided to have a fully splash-out kind of honeymoon (the best kind). However we soon realised how expensive even breakfast is in these hotels, so I started to research our options.
Our honeymoon destinations were New Zealand, Moorea and Bora Bora, the later two being in the super duper Honeymoon capital French Polynesia. In French Polynesia there are a wide range of known hotel chains. However, these are not your bog standard city corporate Hilton or Marriott, these are overwater tropical heaven. You do not even recognise the hotels as their brand. After doing some research and seeing the benefit of staying in the same brand for our honeymoon we decided to stick with Hilton (which includes Conrad brand).
One main advantage of being Gold Status with Hilton Honors is that you automatically get free breakfast. It sounds crazy but if we had paid for breakfast during our honeymoon, that alone would have cost over $1000!
Keep reading on how to get Hilton Honors gold status without needing to spend much to get there.
Step 1: Get gold status loyalty with another hotel brand
Luckily enough, I already had 7 nights with Novotel after a work trip earlier in the year. Novotel is part of Accor group. To reach gold status with Accor requires 30 status nights. However this can actually be achieved without completing all of the nights!
Get 20 free nights with AccorPlus
Most of the time there is an offer on with Accor to sign up for AccorPlus. At the time there was an offer for Accor Plus Traveller Membership for 4000 Accor live points. I had some points with Qatar that were about to expire and saw I could transfer these to Accor. That gave me enough to get this membership without spending a penny.
As you can see with Accor Plus – you get 20 free bonus nights. I do not know any other hotel that does this and this is why Accor was my choice.
As mentioned, in order to get gold status with Accor you need 30 nights. It’s also important to know that Accor has strict timing to achieve the 30 nights, this has to be within the Jan-Dec of the year. At the end of each year status nights get wiped and you have to start collecting again from scratch. The following year your loyalty will be whatever you achieved in the previous year.
I had 3 nights left to reach 30 nights. Two of these nights we completed by booking a local Ibis Budget for under $100 (note yes you do have to check in and out in person). Some Ibis Budget do not count towards Accor status nights, so make sure to check this in the app before hand (when looking at the hotel check for the All Accor tick). The last night we splashed out for a nice end of year night in a city hotel that was on Accor red hot rooms.
Gold status achieved! I don’t want to miss the great things about Accor gold itself: good discount on the hotel restaurants, red hot room deals, and free upgrades if vacancies.
To summarise gold status with Accor:
- 30 nights are required to be completed in the calendar year to achieve gold.
- If you achieve gold status in 2024, you will have gold status until the end of 2025.
Step 2: Accor status match with Hilton
Once you achieve gold with another hotel brand, you can then apply for that status match challenge with Hilton. Note that: you only can do this once in your lifetime so choose wisely (e.g. I did it for my honeymoon), also the status match is only for 90 days so time it correctly.
There is normally a deal as well, that if you stay with Hilton for over 8 nights during those 90 days then you can keep your Gold status for at least a year, and 14 nights you get Platinum status for at least a year.
Now let’s talk about the status match procedure. The link to submit the Hilton Honors status match is as follows https://www.hiltonhonors.com/en_US/status-match/landing/.
You will notice that there is no option in the download for Accor, but there is an option for ‘other’. I selected this option and wrote All Accor. You also need to upload the evidence of a recent stay that you have paid for with that hotel brand and proof of your status. Now it is all in their hands, they have no commitment to approve everything.
My status match got approved within 10 days, which I believe is about average timing. Note that as Accor is not in the list, I suspect they may be a bit more picky on this. As I am based in Australia I think this probably helped as there is less loyalty to the Hilton Honours brand here than there would be in the US.
Now once this gets approved all you need to think is….was all of this worth it?
The Answer: Yes…yes it was 🙂
Oh and we ended up with Platinum status until March 2026. So where to next!
Dive into my blog post all about an incredible honeymoon in Bora Bora, featuring tips on accommodations and tips for your vacation.
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