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Is my time worth 1,000 points for Hilton HHonors Password Security?

Last month Hilton HHonors announced members are required to change their 4-digit PIN by April 1, 2015. Hilton HHonors members’ new passwords will require at least eight characters, at least one upper case letter, and at least one number or one special character. Proactive members earn 1,000 points for changing their password by March 25.

Loyalty Traveler – 1,000 points free for changing Hilton HHonors password Feb 19 to March 8, 2015 (Feb 19, 2015).

Turned out the Hilton HHonors website was all screwed up and members could not change their password on February 19.

Then, Hilton HHonors started the messaging again with an offer for 1,000 bonus points who proactively change their password between March 12 and March 25, 2015.

An HHonors Security Alert message appears when you load the Hilton website.

HHonors Security Alert

Since dozens of BoardingArea bloggers posted about these changes last week, I decided to wait until this week to write about the HHonors 1,000 points, just in case you were without connectivity for the past week.

The password change should be a sixty second effort, however, I just spent close to 15 minutes trying to change my Hilton HHonors account password and preferences.

I created a new username. Since 1998 my username was simply my HHonors number. I changed my password from a 4-digit PIN to another password.

And I thought I should add my AAA membership number to see if that would prevent me from needing to insert it every time I want to book a AAA rate.

When I clicked the “Save Changes” button, the message came back, “Sorry, that email address is already registered. Enter a different one and try again.”

HHonors email error

Well yeah, that email has been registered to my account for more than a decade.

I tried several times to submit my changes with my new username and password with the same result. I changed email addresses, deleted email addresses and more. I closed down my browser and started over again.

Eventually I tracked down the error to the AAA membership number as the cause for the email error. I now have a new username and a new password for my HHonors account.

Still, I have no AAA number linked to my account.

Is my time worth 1,000 points for Hilton HHonors Password Security?

I guess account activity in March 2015 keeps the points alive for another year.

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6 Comments

  • Mike March 16, 2015

    Ironic post title considering you wrote a whole article on the subject.

  • Ric Garrido March 16, 2015

    @Mike – this article is worth more to me than 1,000 HHonors points.

    And hopefully I save some other member from trying to add AAA membership number in the same session used to change password.

    You might be surprised at how many hotel website glitches are fixed after I post an article about my problems.

  • Raffles March 16, 2015

    As it is compulsory to change your password after April 1st (or whenever) the questioj is really whether it is worth 1000 points to push it up your ‘to do’ list!

  • Ric Garrido March 16, 2015

    @Raffles – agreed.

    I want another Hilton stay before my HHonors Gold expires at the end of the month.

  • Hilton HHonors Password Change 1000 free points campaign exposed security flaws - Loyalty Traveler - Loyalty Traveler March 23, 2015

    […] Today I came across an article on the website Krebs on Security explaining the inside story on why Hilton probably shut down the password change campaign in February and relaunched the campaign last week for 1,000 HHonors bonus points when you change your HHonors PIN to a password by Wednesday March 25, 201…. […]

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