My experiments with the quarterly Hilton credit on the American Express Business Platinum Card started in London with a fairly simple question: could I use the credit at a Hilton-family hotel when I wasn’t actually staying there?

The answer has proved remarkably consistent. I’ve been walking into Hilton properties, buying something directly from a hotel-operated bar, restaurant or café, paying with an enrolled Business Platinum Card and waiting to see what happens. Across an expanding group of London hotels, with a few exceptions, the charges have been triggering the Hilton credit.

Melbourne offered an opportunity to take the experiment somewhere new. More importantly, it offered something I couldn’t realistically do quickly in London: test the entire local Hilton portfolio.

There are four Hilton-family hotels I considered part of central Melbourne for this exercise: Hilton Melbourne Little Queen Street, DoubleTree by Hilton Melbourne Flinders Street, Next Hotel Melbourne from Curio Collection, and The Motley Hotel Richmond from Tapestry Collection. They also happen to represent four different Hilton brands.

Over the course of my stay, I went to all four. I wasn’t staying at any of them. I bought a coffee at each property, charged it to an enrolled Business Platinum Card and waited.

All four credits posted.

Four properties isn’t an enormous dataset. What makes Melbourne useful is its completeness. I didn’t pick four convenient Hilton hotels from a much larger pool. These were all four of the central Melbourne Hilton-family properties I identified for the test, and every one worked.

It also extends the evidence beyond straightforward Hilton and DoubleTree properties. Curio Collection and Tapestry Collection are precisely the sorts of brands where I was more interested in seeing what happened.

Hilton Melbourne Little Queen Street was the most obviously Hilton of the four tests, but the hotel itself isn’t especially conventional.

It occupies the former Equity Trustees building, an imposing heritage façade that makes it feel quite different from the modern tower hotels scattered around central Melbourne. Inside, that history is still very visible, particularly in Luci, which occupies the soaring former banking hall beneath a mezzanine.

I stopped in for coffee rather than breakfast, although the substantial breakfast setup made clear that this is a proper hotel restaurant rather than a small lobby café.

The transaction subsequently triggered the Business Platinum Hilton credit. As the Hilton-branded member of the group, this was perhaps the least surprising result, but it established the Australian baseline: the same basic approach I’d been using in London worked in Melbourne too.

The DoubleTree occupies a very different setting, directly on Flinders Street and close to the station. From outside it looks much more like the practical city hotel that it is.

Inside, Platform 270 and the adjoining bar are darker and rather more inviting than the fairly ordinary exterior suggests. I bought my coffee there, again without staying at the hotel.

The credit posted. By this point, Hilton and DoubleTree working in Melbourne wasn’t especially surprising. The more interesting tests were still to come.

The Motley was different. It’s out on Bridge Road in Richmond rather than in the CBD itself, but I included it in the central Melbourne group because it is one of the four Hilton-family properties serving the central city market. Its Tapestry Collection branding also made it a considerably more useful test than another conventional Hilton.

The hotel has far more personality inside than I expected: portraits, patterned floors, unusual lighting and a lot of color.

I had hoped to see the rooftop bar as well, which might have given me enough material to consider a broader look at the property. That wasn’t possible during my visit, so this remains what it was intended to be: a credit test and a look around the parts of the hotel I could access.

The coffee itself came with a particularly Melbourne backdrop: sitting inside with a tram passing outside on Bridge Road.

The Motley charge subsequently triggered the Hilton credit. That was a more useful result. The Motley isn’t a conventional Hilton-branded hotel, so seeing an ordinary walk-in café purchase produce the same result added another useful brand to the growing dataset.

Next was the test I was most interested in. The hotel is tucked into the 80 Collins development, with an entrance that doesn’t announce itself like a conventional large Hilton. Its restaurant, La Madonna, is integrated into the hotel but has a sufficiently distinct identity that this was one sort of transaction I particularly wanted to test.

I went to La Madonna for coffee and sat in the restaurant. While the paper receipt subsequently disappeared somewhere during the rest of the trip, the Amex transaction remained visible online and, more importantly, the corresponding Hilton credit posted.

La Madonna was the one place I left thinking I’d quite like to come back for a proper drink or meal.

Beyond the restaurant, the curved staircase was the feature that caught my eye.

For the experiment, though, the important point is much simpler: a walk-in purchase at La Madonna, without a hotel stay, successfully triggered the Business Platinum Hilton credit at a Curio Collection property in Australia.

Melbourne doesn’t prove that every Hilton-family restaurant or bar everywhere in the world will trigger the credit. Merchant arrangements can differ, independently operated outlets exist, and a successful transaction at one property tells us nothing definitive about another.

But the result is unusually tidy. I tested all four central Melbourne Hilton-family hotels I had identified. The properties represented Hilton, DoubleTree, Tapestry Collection and Curio Collection. I wasn’t staying at any of them. In each case I made a small on-property purchase and paid at the restaurant or cafe, not the hotel front desk. All four credits posted.

That’s useful in a different way from the London testing. London is becoming a large and growing collection of individual data points. Melbourne is a complete small-market test: every property in the defined group, across four different brands, producing the same result.

There was also an unexpected echo of what happened in London. Once the credit itself started looking predictable, the hotels became more interesting than the transactions. The Motley turned out to be much quirkier inside than I expected. Next concealed a surprisingly smart restaurant and bar behind its understated entrance. Hilton Little Queen Street occupies a fascinating old building. Even a coffee at the DoubleTree provided an excuse to look properly at a hotel I’d otherwise have walked straight past.

The four Melbourne coffees also exhausted my remaining Business Platinum Hilton-credit capacity for the quarter. So, for now, the experiment stops here. That’s not a bad place to stop. Four hotels, four brands, four successful credits, and an entire city group checked off.

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Hilton Credits in London: Five More Tests

Hilton Credits in London: Chelsea to Kensington

Testing Hilton Credits Abroad: Netherlands