Finally, a Hyatt Award Availability Calendar: A look at Rooms.aero, Seats.aero’s new hotel search tool

Seats.aero has been one of my favorite new flight award search tools over the last year. It’s not perfect and requires a little bit of previous knowledge to maximize, but the power and speed of the engine is incredible.

The folks who made Seats.aero have been working on a hotel booking site for a while: Rooms.aero. They recently made the beta version available to use publicly and given how much I like Seats.aero, I was excited to give it a whirl. It’s definitely a beta site and, as such, there’s a limited amount of programs and properties loaded. However, after noodling around a bit, I’m even more excited. This has the potential to be an incredibly powerful tool. For the first time ever, it provides an actual award availability calendar for World of Hyatt, something that’s been sorely absent on Hyatt’s own booking platform.

Rooms.aero’s search function

I’ve been playing around a bit on the beta version of Rooms.aero and what I’ve seen so far is pretty sweet. Let’s take a quick look at some of the highlights.

The landing page looks very similar to Seats.aero and the basic options are similar: you can “explore” a program, look for specific hotels and set alerts. We’ll start with the explore feature first, as I think it’s the most exciting.

The only three programs currently live on the beta site are IHG One Rewards, Hilton Honors and World of Hyatt. Clicking the “Explore” dropdown will allow you to choose one of those three programs but, World of Hyatt seems to have the most properties loaded, so we’ll take a look at that first. Selecting WOH, we get to this menu:

Like Seats.aero, this is giving us all the availability that the tool sees throughout the entire WOH program (of the properties that it’s currently running searches for) until the end of its year-long search window. Note that this general search has over 15,000 pages of results, or 153,821 entries. The table can be sorted by hotel name, when the property was last checked, arrival date, standard room availability and suite availability. There’s also some very powerful and easy to use filters on the menu bar at the top:

• Nights: You can search one night at a time, or filter results based on multi-night stays. Last weekend, I was able to search for up to five nights at a time, but that’s currently down to three. I can’t imagine that the final site won’t have the ability to search for four and five night stays to take advantage of 4th night free with IHG and 5th night free with Hilton and Marriott.

• Hotel Brand: This allows you to search for brands within the program. Currently, for World of Hyatt, Rooms.aero searches all brands, but you can only filter by Alila, Andaz, Grand Hyatt, Park Hyatt and Thompson properties. More will be on the way soon as additional properties are loaded. You can still find other brands by searching for “Hyatt Place,” for example.

• Hotel Category: This allows you to search by WOH hotel category (1-8) or all-inclusive category (A-F).

• Country: Filters by country. You could, for example, search all of the Category 4 properties in Mexico.

• Points cost: Another terrific feature, this allows you to filter by maximum points cost per night. In this case, it will show you all the results at a specific points cost and below.

• Cents Per Point: This is incredible. Rooms.aero searches both the points AND cash cost of most properties. It can then calculate the value that you’re getting for using your points as cents-per-point (cpp). You can then filter by that metric and compare it to our Reasonable Redemption Values or your own standards for the value that you like to get from a given program.

Put together, this is probably the most powerful, filterable hotel award search engine that I’ve seen. The ability to combine program-wide geographical searches with multi-night stays, cpp, points cost and property category all lumped in is astounding.

Searching World of Hyatt with Rooms.aero

Let’s use the explore function to do a search. I want to see 3-night stays in Costa Rica that cost less than 30,000 Hyatt points per night. The search takes about a second and here’s what I find:

Note that there are 1,335 page 3-night stays in Costa Rica at Hyatt properties over the next year (it stores data all the way to the end of the calendar). I like my Hyatt points though and get a lot of value from them. So, let’s further refine the search by only looking at properties that give at least 2cpp value:

That narrows it down a bit more, primarily to the Andaz Papagayo, a property that I’ve been wanting to go to for years. So, we’ll click on that in order to do a search for dates at that property only:

There it is. Finally, a Hyatt award availability calendar. You can look at points calendars on Hyatt.com, but all that will give you is what the points cost would be if an award was available. You then have to click into each individual date to find out if there’s actually bookable rooms for points on that night. Here, we’re seeing actual suite and standard room availability with both points and cash cost AND we can sort it for multi-night stays. If that’s not cool enough, you can then hit the info button on the right side for any available night and see both pictures and room descriptions for every available room:

Wow.

Rooms.aero “Hotels” search function

I tend to start most of my searches by place or program as opposed to specific cities or dates, which is part of what I like so much about seats.aero. Similarly, I love the explore function on Rooms.aero as well. But you can also look for a property first and then quickly find rooms by using the “Hotels” drop down on the landing page. in this case, that gets you to a list of all World of Hyatt properties in the database, sorted by category:

Here again, you can sort by category (default), hotel name, country or state. You can also use the search box to look for specific brands, regions or countries. There’s 52 pages of Hyatt properties currently loaded. By searching for “Texas,” we’ll just see properties within the state. You can then click through to get to the searchable calendar.

Creating room alerts with Rooms.aero

You can also create alerts with Rooms.aero, whereby you can look for specific dates, properties or regions and then be alerted by e-mail if it finds what you’re looking for. The alert setup screen looks like this:

This is pretty standard info for alerts, but being able to combine multi-night stays with suite availability and a points maximum is a powerful. Being able to create unlimited alerts is even better. The only part of the alert that’s currently a paid feature is being able to create one for the entire calendar (“any date”). The free alerts are limited to a given arrival date. However, since you can create as many alerts as you want fairly quickly, it would be pretty easy to search for a couple of weeks at a time by creating individual alerts for each day. I haven’t had a chance to play around with the alerts yet, but I’ll be doing so with some hard-to-find-properties soon.

Final Thoughts

I’m very impressed by what I see on this beta version of Rooms.aero. It’s not ready for full prime-time yet and the task of getting a sizeable chunk of Marriott, IHG and Hilton properties loaded is herculean. The frequency of searches isn’t what it eventually needs to be, either. However, simply put, I haven’t seen another hotel award search tool like it. The speed with which you can quickly isolate exactly the award availability that you’re looking for is amazing…and the ability to create free, unlimited alerts is terrific as well. I can’t wait to see the final product but, in the meantime, I’m going to enjoy taking a few more spins on the beta site.

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