AmEx Failed to Transfer Referral Points to Hilton

We know that you can refer a friend for AmEx Hilton Ascend and AmEx Hilton Aspire card: You can earn 20,000/25,000 bonus Hilton Honor points for every approved account you refer, up to 80,000 Hilton Honor Points per calendar year.

In fact, the limit of referral bonus from AmEx Hilton cards is 82,090 instead of 80,000. For each account, you may earn up to 82,090 referral bonus each calendar year. For example, I attached the February statement from my AmEx Hilton Ascend account:

However, after three months, these 82,090 points still have not been transferred to my Hilton Honor account yet. After discussing with other blog authors and readers, this seems to be a long standing problem with AmEx Hilton since this January. Here are some DPs from the comments (In Chinese): 1, 2, 3, 4.  Moreover, RH shares his experience with AmEx Hilton:

This is a long standing well known problem with AmEx and Hilton. Spend, referral and such bonus points AmEx shows as posted on statement and claims are sent to Hilton, but Hilton never receives and swears AmEx has not sent to them. I am still awaiting for some points from Sept, 2017 activity that AmEx posted late in January, show as posted on statement, but AmEx has never sent to Hilton. Have had multiple cases opened and closed by AmEx and endless lies told. AmEx can easily solve it by posting the points properly, but AmEx CS is expressly forbidden from doing so, apparently. (Have spent a good 10+ hours – more worth than the points – on countless chats and phone calls with AmEx and Hilton both conferenced in. Everyone knows it’s a problem, but the AmEx “department” that has to fix it is unwilling to do so, so the cases keep being closed without resolution and reopened by CS.) Good luck. This seems like a common thing with AmEx nowadays: lying about what is posed to Hilton. 

Thanks. I was just glad to see this post. This confirmed what AmEx CS has told me was true: that it’s a system-wide problem impacting many 1000s of customers, that has went unresolved for many months.

Most recent DPs from other authors suggest that AmEx has fixed this problem for new referrals, which means if you refer a friend now, you should get your Hilton Honor points as expected. However, there is no indication of transferring points to Hilton Honors for old referrals posted from January to late April. At this stage, I encourage our blog readers who have been affected by this issue:

  1. To keep calling AmEx Hilton and let them know this long standing system-wide problem and solve it ASAP.
  2. To make a CFPB complaint and let AmEx Hilton realize how this unresolved IT problem is affecting us.

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