I switched some of my hotel business to Hyatt in early March, and in those two short months I’ve made over 20 stays at Hyatt properties thanks to the insane promotions they have. Overall I couldn’t have been happier. I’ve earned nearly ten free nights I can use anywhere in the world and around 65,000 points, which is nearly enough for four more free nights at top Hyatt hotels.
Simply put, I just couldn’t find even the smallest thing to complain about with them until now.
So I’m heading to New York this coming week with my family, and initially we were going to spend the first night at the Andaz Wall Street (on an ANDAZ5 revenue stay), and spend the other two nights at the InterContinental Barclay. Well, due to the busy schedule we’ll have in New York, I was going to just do the Andaz for the whole stay and cancel the InterContinental (not to mention save 80,000 Priority Club points).
Well, for some reason Hyatt doesn’t let you book “Big Welcome Back” nights within a week or your desired stay date, so I had to call. Before doing that, though, I checked hyatt.com to see if a standard room was available at the Andaz on the dates I needed. When using points there are no capacity controls, meaning if there’s a standard room available, you can use points for it. And up until now, when using promotional free nights, the same lack of capacity controls applied.
But when I called reservations, they told me that I couldn’t redeem one of my free night certificates, but I could redeem points. There’s no way I’m spending 18,000 points per night on an Andaz.
So it seems Hyatt finally has made promotional award night inventory different than points inventory. Can’t say I blame ’em, but doesn’t mean I won’t rant about it. 😉
I’m hoping that the free night availability opens up closer to departure.
Anyone else run into the same issue?
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