Hilton's Connecting Room Guarantee: A Guide - NerdWallet (2024)

Hilton launched its connecting room guarantee in mid-2021. This guarantee, which allows travelers to confirm that their rooms are together during booking, allows larger groups peace of mind when on the road. As the first major hotel company to offer this benefit, you’ll need just three days advance notice to secure this benefit. Here's a look at how Hilton’s connected room guarantee works.

How does the connecting room guarantee work?

As would seem obvious, the connecting room guarantee works by ensuring that you can book two adjoining rooms. This is in contrast to past, when travelers would have to book two rooms, then call the hotel and hope they had the availability and the space to switch rooms around.

As we mentioned above, Hilton is the first major hotel chain that guarantees connecting rooms. To secure these for your stay, you’ll need to search for at least two rooms at once. You’ll also need to do so more than three days in advance of your arrival.

Finding a Hilton connected room

To find two connected rooms with Hilton, you’ll need to navigate to the hotel chain’s website. This can also be done via the app.

The home page features a search bar where you’ll input your information, such as travel dates and desired location.

If you’re looking to score a connecting room, you’ll want to search for at least two rooms at once. This can be found in the drop-down menu by selecting the ”add room” icon.

Connecting rooms work with both paid stays and those where you’re redeeming reward points. Once you’ve chosen the rates you’d like, you’ll select “Find a Hotel” to start your search.

You’ll be presented with a list of available Hilton properties as well as a dynamic map. To filter by hotels with connecting rooms, select the “Filters” button near the top.

From here you can choose a variety of filters, including which hotel brand you’d like, whether the hotel is pet-friendly and if it contains a pool. However, by scrolling down to “Hotel Features,” you’ll find the “Connecting Rooms” box.

Check this box and then click “Done.” Then, Hilton will update your search to show hotels that offer conjoined rooms only.

From here, you can see which hotels are offering confirmed connecting rooms. You’ll also note that standard room rewards are available at each of these properties.

Although Hilton doesn’t have a published award chart, it does offer standard room rewards. These award redemptions will generally cap out at 120,000 points per night. Premium room rewards, meanwhile, have no cap whatsoever and can fluctuate drastically.

Saving points with connected rooms

If you’ve traveled with a larger group, you’ve probably felt the frustration of trying to fit everyone into a single room. This is the case, especially when traveling in Europe, where room occupancy limits tend to be lower than in the U.S.

When your party consists entirely of adults, it’s not a big deal to book two separate reward rooms and sleep down the hall from each other. But if you’re a family traveling with children, constant access to each other may be necessary.

In the past, this meant something like booking Hilton’s premium room rewards, which can easily cost hundreds of thousands of Hilton Honors points per night. Otherwise, you could try booking two separate rooms and hoping that connections were available. However, that could easily result in families being split apart and parents needing to each take their own room with kids.

When booking connecting rooms, remember that the guarantee applies to reward rooms as well as cash bookings. This means you can avoid premium room rewards while still maintaining access.

This premium room option is actually just two connecting rooms rather than a suite, but the expense of 321,000 points per night can be greatly reduced when searching for two rooms rather than one. In this case, you’ll be able to select connecting king and twin rooms for 67,000 points per night each. This means you could manually book connecting rooms for less than half the cost of the single-family room on points.

The astronomical price you’ll pay for premium room rewards also does a disservice to your Hilton Honors points. One night in the Palace 5 star connecting room costs roughly $939 after taxes and fees when paying in cash. So redeeming 321,000 points for that same room means you’ll be receiving just 0.29 cents in value per point, far less than they’re actually worth.

If you want to book using Hilton’s connected room initiative

Hilton’s connecting room guarantee is an excellent addition to an already expensive hotel chain. Thanks to its ease of use, finding connecting rooms is simple and intuitive — these search filters are available on Hilton’s website when searching every individual property and within Hilton’s app.

More than convenience, however, taking advantage of confirmed connecting rooms can help groups enjoy a larger amount of space and even extra bathrooms, all while saving tons of points on bookings.

Photo courtesy of Hilton.