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If you have Hyatt Diamond upgrade certificates set to expire at the end of day today, you may be able to extend the life of your expiring Hyatt upgrade certificates! To find the current status of your certificates, log into your account, go to Account Details, then click on My Awards. As of this morning I had 4 unused certificates that were set to expire.
Last night, ThePointsOfLife reported that upgrades booked with these expiring certificates were changeable after today. That is different than expected. It was expected that once applied, the upgrades could not be changed or reused.
It appears that this may be an IT issue. Hyatt has changed the go-forward rules regarding these upgrade certificates. In the future you won’t be able to apply a certificate to a stay that takes place past the certificate’s expiration date. Certificates expiring today, though, can be applied to future stays. It appears that Hyatt accomplishes this exception by turning the 2015 certificates into 2016 certificates.
This morning, I made 4 prospective bookings then called and upgraded all 4 of them. Note that I did not re-qualify for Hyatt Diamond status, so today was my last chance to apply upgrades. After applying the upgrades, I checked my account and found this:
Notice that my account now showed that I had redeemed 4 certificates that expire end of February 2017? Unless Hyatt runs through the accounts to clean this up later (which is possible, of course), this means that I should be able to change these upgrades to different reservations through Feb 2017!
Rather than keep these unwanted reservations in my account, I called to cancel them and asked that the certificates be re-deposited in my account. Now my account looks like this:
I now have 3 upgrade certificates that are good through Feb 2017! Apparently they messed up and failed to re-credit one of the upgrade certificates but I’m certainly not going to complain. I shouldn’t have had any!
Summary
When applied to future stays, 2015 upgrade certificates are being converted to 2016 upgrade certificates. Thus, it appears that this extends the life of the certificates for a year. This is huge since many people with expiring certificates probably do not know if/when they’ll need them within the next year.
To Do
If you have certificates that expire today, use them!
- Book a separate Hyatt stay for each certificate. In order to increase the chance that upgrades are available, it’s a good idea to check first that there are suites for sale on the dates you book.
- Call Hyatt to apply your upgrade certificates to the stays.
- (optional) Call back later in the day to cancel the stays and recover the certificates
Note: there is no guarantee that this will really work, but I think it’s worth a try!
Hat Tip goes to Julian, the Devil’s Advocate for telling me about this trick.
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What happens if you cancel online rather than calling in?
An agent told me that the certs will be lost unless an agent manually redeposits them.
I just spoke with three different HGP reps, and none of them allowed me to “re-deposit” the certificates to my account. They all said that if I wanted to make a different booking sometime today, they’d re-apply the used/canceled certificate, but otherwise they won’t dump it back into my account since they’re supposed to expire tonight. I don’t know if that’s different than what they were doing earlier today, but it sounds different than how you described your encounter.
How long does it take for the certs to be applied? I booked 4 a couple of hours ago and it still shows that i’ve redeemed 0 in my suite upgrade award section.
Takes days. Don’t worry about that.
Actually mine were reflected virtually instantaneously…I posted the link above to mine about 2 mins after my call with the rep.
Interesting. All mine in the past have taken days to go through.
Yeah, I don’t think that this is going to work out. I booked one on Friday and it took a day to clear my account. My account shows 0 left through Feb 2017, when I really have 2 left expiring today and will get 4 more tomorrow.
Scroll down and click the + next to the second “Suite Upgrade Award” section. There you should see the status of your expiring certs. You will probably see 2 or 3 available expiring today.
You are correct – thanks. Definitely something weird going on with their site. I have 3 of 4 available through today. 0 of 1 available through Feb 17. It’s like their site thinks the time already passed and they rolled already, ha. This should be interesting…
Just tried to do this – the Hyatt diamond rep told me that these will actually be the ‘new certificates’ not the old ones. He said that some members have been under the mistake impression that the old certificates will be used. I’m a diamond again for 2016 so I will have new certificates as of tomorrow. I didn’t press the agent… will find out I guess how it turns out.
Here’s how my account looks – so it appears they are doing something different here.
https://www.evernote.com/l/AAvTqaSbHtVJfarufg700Q8OQSAh-vP4bn0
That’s consistent with how my account looks too. I didn’t mention in the post that the 2015 certs aren’t being removed.
Awesome, and now the Hyatt website is down so nothing can be booked. Surprising that the website was fine until your blog post hit.
The site is still working for me. May be worth trying from a different browser / IP Address