The Park Hyatt New York is arguably the most anticipated hotel opening of the year. While New York has a lot of luxury hotels, in my experience a vast majority of them are “old world” and past their prime. So having a new, modern, luxurious hotel is exciting!
The hotel went on sale earlier this year for stays starting August 28, 2014, though they’ve now updated that to accept reservations for arrivals from August 12, 2014 and beyond.
The Park Hyatt New York is slated to have just 210 rooms, in keeping with the more “boutique” feel of the brand, and 92 of those will be suites, which is a very high proportion. So not only is it a small hotel to begin with, but almost half of the rooms are suites.
Park Hyatt New York room concept
Historically Hyatt Gold Passport doesn’t have blackout dates for free night stays. As long as a standard room is available, you can redeem points for it. This benefit can be costly for the loyalty program to fulfill when the economy is good and when hotels are otherwise full, since award guests are in many cases displacing guests that would otherwise be willing to pay cash.
What’s interesting is that the Park Hyatt New York doesn’t have any standard rooms loaded in their system through the end of 2015, meaning you can’t pay for a standard room with either points or cash.
TravelSort spoke to Hyatt, and it seems to not be a bug:
As you can imagine with our new opening there is very high demand, in particular from our most loyal Gold Passport members redeeming both awards and points. We have a limited inventory of the standard king and double room types and they have been booking very quickly and into the future since we began accepting reservations in February. I have looked into the availability for the remainder of 2014 and unfortunately this is not a glitch we are fully committed on all of the standard Park rooms.
I can kind of see all perspectives here. If all standard rooms were available for award redemptions, chances are this hotel would be mostly occupied by guests on Gold Passport awards, and that would be disproportionately expensive for Hyatt Gold Passport, as they’d be compensating the hotel at the average daily rate for those award redemptions — that’s potentially about three cents per point. Long term it’s not an issue, but short term with the amount of buzz around the hotel, I can see that being a challenge.
Technically no one is breaking any terms here. Since the hotel isn’t selling standard rooms, there’s no obligation for them to release award nights. Though it sure seems like part of the reason the hotel isn’t releasing rooms is because they don’t want them to all be booked on awards.
Here’s to hoping the hotel is just having pre-opening jitters. I’m guessing that’s the case, and that within a few weeks they’ll make standard rooms available. It’s an interesting development, in the meantime.
(Tip of the hat to TravelSort)
Tonight they *were* still selling standard rooms, and still HyattConcierge told me I couldn't book with points. Only when I sent them screenshots of the booking app and the T&C did they cave. Same thing happened to us at PH Vendome.
I have a standard night booked for December using points. As other people have commented, availability was wide open when booking earlier in the year.
I've run into this issue at other properties (namely PH Paris) where *standard* rooms have been for sale, but not for award redemption. GP told me that they had run out of rooms allocated for awards.
Another anticipated hotel opening is The Peninsula in Paris.
I have 4 nights booked at the PH NYC at the end of november. did so a couple months ago. at first i was only able to get 1 night then a few weeks later the rest opened up.
Sounds like it's the equivalent of Westin Napa Verasa, where there are only 5 standard rooms in the entire property. Either that, or the inventory has not been loaded yet.
They had Gold Passport rooms bookable when they began booking back in February. I know because I wanted to stay there. But they were going VERY fast. After almost missing out due to one of their reps not knowing how to use my free night certificates there, I ended up booking them a couple days later as a room opened up that had previously been purchased.
Award room inventory could even be only about half of the 118 non-suite rooms b/c above the base "Park King" and "Park Double" rooms, there are "Park Deluxe King" and "Park Deluxe Doubles", which the property doesn't necessarily have to open up to award bookings.
I have 3 nights booked in November using points. Booked it about a month ago.
My friend works for the the Hyatt Goldpassport Dept, and he told me that Hyatt needs to compensate the Park Hyatt NYC around $460(including all taxes) a night for an award redemption.
As someone else has already said. Hyatt free night certs work. I'm booked for valentines day. :-)
I made a one night reservation in May 2015 on GP points a few weeks ago.
This is the same hotel that that took reservations for July, then did nothing to help/compensate guests when the opening date slipped back to August (besides rebooking what was on Hyatt.com). The hotel didn't even contact guests, they outsourced it to corporate.
Also, ELITE discounts seem not to be available anywhere in NYC, nor is there any hotel in NYC where you can use your one free night privilege.
That confirms my findings as well. It's just too bad that you cannot phantom book a standard room and then upgrade it with a suite upgrade. :) That would be nice!
They may be all sold out of standard rooms now but they were not before. I am using my two free nights from the Chase Hyatt Visa there this coming December. I booked back in April - and even then I didn't get the exact dates I wanted - but there was a decent amount of availability when I booked.
Do we have any reason not to take them at their word - that they really are sold out of standard rooms for 2014? 118 rooms filled in NYC does not seem too crazy.
2015 may be a different story, did Hyatt comment on that?