Hyatt has just announced a significant improvement with the way that it handles online booking of free night awards.
Until now, Hyatt’s system would automatically choose the free night award that was closest to expiring and apply that to a free night booking. The problem is that are two types of awards, one that’s good for properties in award categories 1-4 and another that’s good for categories 1-7. The system wouldn’t differentiate between those two and, if you had a category 1-7 that was next in line to expire, it would automatically apply that to the stay, even if the property was a category 4 or lower. The only way to change it was to call in before the stay and have and an agent manually change the award. If you didn’t notice until after you checked-in, well, you’re out of luck.
Now Hyatt has added functionality to its “Pay My Way” system that allows you to choose the specific free night award that you want applied to the reservation.
How it Works
Pay My Way is a nifty feature that Hyatt has which allows World of Hyatt members to use multiple payment types on a reservation of more than one night. You can choose to pay for each night with points, free night awards or cash. You’ll find it on the rate display after choosing a room on a multi-night reservation (note that, if you have “Use Points” checked in the search box, you won’t see the Pay My Way option):
When you select “Pay My Way,” you’ll see a pop-up screen that shows you each night in your stay, with the cash, points and free nights that are available for each night:
Notice that, under awards, it now says “Select Award” where it used to say simply, “Free Night.” If you click that button, another pop-up appears that shows your applicable free night awards and lets you choose which one to use:
If you had a category 1-7 certificate, it would appear here, and you’d have to choose to use it, as opposed to it being automatically applied.
There’s one small problem
Unfortunately, Pay My Way only applies to stays of more than one night. This means that, if you’re booking a one night stay, you won’t have the option to use it and you’re back to square one with the system automatically applying the award closest to expiry. One night bookings are probably what got most people (including me) into trouble in the past, having the system apply a category 1-7 award on a one-night category <4 stay.
We’ve reached out to Hyatt to find out if they plan to extend this functionality to one-night stays as well and will update this post when we hear.
Regardless, this is a nice improvement that will make free night awards easier to use.
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If you are Globalist, they give you all these club passes that you don’t need. I wish they’d fix that too. I do love Hyatt though.
Finally!
I hope Marriott is paying attention.
One correction: calling in before the stay and having and an agent manually change the award is not the only way. You can simply tie up the award you don’t want to use in a dummy booking, then book your real booking with the award you want, then cancel the dummy booking. It sucks having to use this trick, but this sidesteps calling in.
clever. or just call concierge if Globalist.
Yes, not very difficult as long as you remember to cancel. I have done this for years.
I mean I cancel like, 2 minutes later. I don’t wait months on end. It’s just to tie up the free night while you use the one you want. No sense on waiting. I’d say actually be careful you’re not within the cancellation window for the dummy booking. I book several months out when doing this.
Yes this is what I do with Marriott. I think Greg covered it