Hyatt launched Hyatt Homes & Hideaways yesterday, an opportunity to earn elite night credits and points in the World of Hyatt program when booking vacation rental homes. While that sounds good in theory, its implementation so far suggests that it’s not ready for primetime.
The Basics
When booking a stay through Hyatt Homes & Hideaways, you’ll earn 5 base points per dollar spent, along with any elite status tier bonus points. Each night you stay will also earn an elite night credit.
While you’ll earn points on paid stays at the same rate as their regular hotels, if you pay with a Hyatt credit card you’ll only earn an additional 1x rather than 4x as Homes & Hideaways doesn’t count as a Hyatt purchase.
You can pay by credit card or redeem World of Hyatt points for your stay. If wanting to pay with points, you’ll need to have enough points to pay for the entire stay as Points + Cash isn’t an option right now (it’s not known if they’re planning to introduce that as a payment option in the future). Having said that, points redemptions seem to be getting less than 1.5cpp of value (closer to 1.2cpp), so it’s not a great option for using points. You also can’t redeem category 1-4 or 1-7 free night certificates to pay for stays.
If you have your World of Hyatt and American Airlines AAdvantage accounts linked and are eligible, you’ll also earn Advantage miles on stays.
At the time of writing this post, Homes & Hideaways only has properties available in the US, but they’re planning on expanding coverage globally.
Initial Downsides
Considering we spend several months each year both in Hyatt properties and Airbnbs, I was hopeful that there might be something useful for us. My first impressions are far from impressed though.
Lack of Coverage
For starters, coverage across the US seems to be sparse. While some states have – in theory (more about that in a moment) – many cities listed, there are many states where Hyatt Homes & Hideaways has zero presence. That includes Virginia, Kentucky, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan and more.
Non-Existent Homes
Even if you find cities listed when doing a search, that’s no guarantee that Hyatt Homes & Hideaways will have any homes (or hideaways) for you to book. I initially ran a bunch of searches in different cities around the US and every single one displayed zero availability.
What’s particularly strange about that is that in the press release from Hyatt, they’d highlighted that Hawaii is one of the destinations you can book. However, there are only three locations in Hawaii that show up when doing a search and none of those three locations had any homes listed.
Homes Not Available On Selected Dates
Even if you get lucky and find a city where there’s seemingly a home available, it might not actually be bookable. For example, the first location I finally found a home listed in was Augusta, GA where there was a solitary home available for $240 + taxes per night.
I clicked ‘Book Now’ which showed that this property wasn’t actually bookable for the dates I’d entered.
While that wasn’t very helpful, if you click on the date button it does helpfully show which dates are available.
Able To Book Despite No Availability
I had a similar, yet different, experience with a different location. A search for those same dates in Napa listed four properties.
As you can see in the screenshot above, one of those properties was priced at $0 + taxes. That made me curious if there was a pricing glitch with the ability to rack up elite night credits for free, so I clicked ‘Book Now’. That prompted me to log in to my World of Hyatt account and subsequently took me to the booking screen for me to enter my details, payment method, etc. What I couldn’t initially find though was the price.
I finally noticed in the ‘Summary of Fees’ section that the property wasn’t available for the dates selected, despite it letting me enter all my details and having a ‘Confirm Booking’ button at the bottom of the screen. I was tempted to try booking it anyway to see what would happen, but was apprehensive about entering payment information and the subsequent hassle with getting refunded if I was charged an exorbitant amount seeing as the three other Napa homes listed were ~$1,000 per night. Still, it’s strange that it said the property wasn’t bookable on the same screen where it was seemingly letting me book the home.
Poor Search Functionality
Hyatt Homes & Hideaways also has poor search functionality right now in a few ways. First, you can’t search by state. You can start typing in a state name and it’ll list all the cities that should theoretically be bookable there, but you can’t search by state itself which is something you can do with Airbnb, Vacasa, etc.
Secondly, having it list those cities isn’t very helpful because in many cases they’ll be locations you’ve never heard of and so won’t know whereabouts in a state they’re located, despite them being near cities you want to stay near but which aren’t listed on Homes & Hideaways.
For example, when starting to type in ‘California’, it lists a bunch of cities.
There are lots of cities on there I’ve never heard of. When checking their locations on Google Maps, Kirkwood and Colfax are near Sacramento, Groveland is near Modesto and Glen Ellen is near Santa Rosa. However, if you try searching for Sacramento, Modesto or Santa Rosa, none of those cities can be searched for despite users likely searching for larger cities like that in order to find properties in that general area.
Thirdly, on the search results page there’s a map showing the location of homes in that area. Other sites like Airbnb and Vacasa let you drag around the map to search a different area, but not Homes & Hideaways. If you drag the map, no new properties will be displayed and there’s not even an option given on the map to ‘Search this area’ like you get on the regular Hyatt website.
Fourth, if you want to change which city you’ve searched for, that can’t be changed from the search results page. Instead, you have to go back to the home page and search again. What’s even more annoying about that is that it resets everything, so you have to enter the dates and number of guests every single time, even if it’s only the city you want to change.
Fifth, and this is a minor issue, is that you can’t enter whether or not you have a dog with you on that first page. On the search results page you can filter for pet-friendly properties, but Airbnb, Vacasa, Vrbo, etc. let you check a box when entering the number of guests to state that you’ll be bringing a dog with you, thereby automatically filtering for pet-friendly properties at that first step.
Your Finds
As you can tell, I’m not overly impressed with Homes & Hideaways at its current launch stage. However, hopefully these issues get addressed in the future as this new booking option definitely has potential considering you can earn Hyatt points and elite night credits.
However, it might just be that I got unlucky with all the different searches I ran. Have you found any properties worth highlighting for one reason or another? Let us know in the comments below.
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This is my understanding of hotel chains currently:
Marriott has taken “B”
Is Hyatt now taking “H”?
If so, where does that leave Hilton?
Has IHG been forgotten?
Clearly Choice is taking Wyndham. So there’s that…
Weird that it doesn’t qualify for Hyatt earnings on the Visa. Perhaps it qualifies for 3X travel on the CSR?
Wow! So many negatives.
I’m working down my Hyatt point balance anyway in anticipation of a big deval next year. I’m trying to book everything out for next year’s travel by end of this year.
That way, I’m a winner either way.
Regarding bringing a pet, I wish these sites would allow you to filter for properties that are “no pets allowed.” I love our four legged friends but would prefer to rent a home where there haven’t been hundreds of pets cycling through.
Same
Although i don’t know about Hyatt’s rules, unfortunately, Airbnb and VRBO require that hosts allow “service animals” and neither the host nor the site is allowed to even ask what service the animal provides, never mind declining to host a “service animal”. We have had a guest who tied up their two pit bulls outside the house, another that left their “service animal” in the house alone all day while they went about their business and a third who left 3 puppies alone in the house. Each one claimed that they were service animals but what service could they be providing when they aren’t even with their owners most of the time?
We had a group ask for a service animal, then insist we allow a second one because “the seal was broken” I guess. We refused. But yes, the home share platforms are a nightmare for both host and guest (with the insane fees). I feel like the old style property level management of resort properties was a better model overall.
Expecting Kirkwood (a ski resort in the mountains south of Tahoe) to show up in a search for Sacramento is crazy. But obviously they need to have some way to find places in small rural areas without just searching for every tiny town.
So far what I can see is spotty avaiablity AND a 15% to 20% premium over VRBO. I will stick with hotel properties for Hyatt.
Yes, rare fail by Hyatt! Not impressed by the interface and some of the properties.