Hyatt Place Partners With Gopuff – Is It Worth It?

Hyatt Place has launched a partnership with Gopuff and is running a pilot program at almost a dozen properties giving $10 off your first two orders and free delivery.

By coincidence, my wife and I are currently staying at a participating property, so I took Gopuff out for a test drive delivery today to see if there’s any value to be had and if it’s likely to be a useful partnership.

Here’s the full list of participating Hyatt Place properties as part of this pilot program:

Chicago:

• Hyatt Place Chicago/Downtown-The Loop
• Hyatt Place Chicago / Wicker Park

Phoenix:

• Hyatt Place Phoenix/ Chandler-Fashion Center
• Hyatt Place Tempe/Phoenix Airport
• Hyatt Place Phoenix/Mesa
• Hyatt Place Scottsdale/Old Town

Denver:

• Hyatt Place Denver-South/Park Meadows
• Hyatt Place Denver Tech Center
• Hyatt Place Denver Airport

Nashville:

• Hyatt Place Nashville/Downtown
• Hyatt Place Nashville/Opryland

For full disclosure, Hyatt provided Greg, Nick and I with additional promo codes for each of us that were good for $50. I probably wouldn’t have bothered testing this out just for the sake of saving $10 and getting free delivery, but figured it’d be worth it for $50, although it got a little better than that (more about that shortly).

How To Use The Hyatt Place/Gopuff Offer

These are the steps you have to take in order to take advantage of this offer:

• Visit https://gopuff.com/r/gohyattplace 
• Enter in your mobile number and press “Order now” to receive a text verification code 
• GoPuff will immediately send you a text with your unique 6-digit code 
• The landing page will redirect you to a new page where you must enter your unique 6-digit code 
• Enter your 6-digit code where it says “enter code” 
• If you did not receive a code, click “resend code” 
• Once your unique code has been entered, you will be redirected to the GoPuff page 
• Enter your delivery address. If you are ordering from a participating Hyatt location, free delivery will be automatically applied at checkout because your hotel is geo-fenced in a free delivery zone 
• Add items to your cart 
• Checkout and wait for your delivery to arrive! 
• The driver will contact you once they have arrived at your location.

One additional thing I’d suggest is to click through from a shopping portal before visiting the landing page listed above. There aren’t many portals offering cashback for Gopuff (here’s the current list), but the best offer right now is from TopCashback which is offering $35 cashback on your first order.

I clicked through from TopCashback last night and then navigated to the Hyatt Place landing page and registered. It said delivery would be made within 20-40 minutes, so I didn’t place an order seeing as it was something like 1am at that point. I subsequently clicked back through from TopCashback this morning before placing an order. A few hours after it was delivered, the $35 is showing as pending in my account, so it does seem to work.

After registering, you’ll end up on a landing page for the Hyatt Place partnership. This page provides a curated list of products they think Hyatt Place guests might be interested in, but you’re not restricted to ordering from that list.

Initial Impressions

To be completely honest, I’m not overly impressed with Gopuff’s design on desktop. On some pages you can only view one row of products at a time as you scroll down because the top half of the page remains fixed in place and there’s an additional bar at the bottom of the page that can’t be hidden.

Speaking of scrolling down, the scroll bar on the right side of the screen is often hidden, so you have to click on the page and then press the down arrow on your keyboard to scroll down, or you can click the right side of the screen which has the same function as tapping ‘pg dn’ and eventually makes the scroll bar appear.

As for the selection of products available, it’s very weird. At first it seemed like a 7-Eleven range of products but with Whole Foods pricing seeing as everything on Gopuff seems to cost 2-3x what you’d pay at a regular grocery store. For example, $0.69 for a single banana is a lot considering some grocery stores charge ~$0.35 per lb. Similarly, $4.50 for some Oscar Meyer hot dogs is far more than they’d cost elsewhere.

Upon further investigation, the range of products is both more expansive and more limited than I initially thought. For example, I wanted to order some tortillas so I could make a wrap for lunch. However, the only tortillas available from Gopuff were made of brown rice, almond flour or cassava flour. While that’s great for people who like eating cardboard, it would be nice to have the option to order flour or wholewheat tortillas.

They did on the other hand have in stock the best cookies in the history of cookies in the form of McVitie’s Chocolate HobNobs. Seeing as both I and these HobNobs are British, perhaps that should’ve said the best biscuits in the history of biscuits.

Their product selection is perplexing. They have cookies biscuits from the UK, but no regular tortillas. They sell hot dogs, but not hot dog buns.

I spotted tons of errors in Gopuff’s listings which didn’t give a great initial impression. For example, the image for the almond flour tortillas in the screenshot further up has a picture for the cassava flour tortillas, while the listing for the cassava flour tortillas has a picture of almond flour tortillas.

Those weren’t the only issues. On a description for some Lunchables, the description asked ‘Who’s Lunchable is it?’ rather than ‘Whose Lunchable is it?’. Next to that, the description for a Lean Cuisine Fettuccini Alfredo meal listed it as containing a delicious chunky tomato sauce. Unless Lean Cuisine uses tomatoes with a severe case of anemia, I don’t think that’s true.

Other products have Gopuff trying to inject some humor to the descriptions. While that adds a bit of personality to their site, it’d probably be more useful if they were to inject some spellcheck and proofreading instead.

Placing My Gopuff Order

I added just over $50 worth of groceries to my cart and was surprised when the total amount owed showed $0 after applying the $50 promo code. It turns out that the $50 code we received from Hyatt stacks with the $10 discount for your first two orders to a Hyatt Place property, so I ended up being able to get $60 worth of groceries for free. That suggests that you should be able to use some other kind of promo code (perhaps when using someone’s referral code or some other kind of promo code floating around online) on top of the $10 discount.

While free delivery to select Hyatt Place properties sounds good, Gopuff only ever charges a $1.95 delivery fee and so it doesn’t save you too much money. You have the opportunity to tip drivers during the checkout process and their site says 100% of tips go to drivers.

I paid for the $1.31 balance and driver tip with my Amex Gold card as I figured it might code as a grocery purchase. If you have a Cash App debit card, check for a targeted Boost for Gopuff as it gives 20% back on up to $25 of spend which would be a good alternative payment option.

After paying for the order, it takes you to a screen where you can track your order.

This tracking page is another place where Gopuff’s website isn’t correct. Once our order was out for delivery it said that it was due to arrive between 1:26pm and 1:56pm. That was the applicable time in Eastern Time though; we’re currently on Mountain Time and so it should’ve said 11:26am to 11:56am.

How Long Does Gopuff Delivery Take?

Before placing our order, Gopuff’s website said that orders take 20-40 minutes to arrive. I’m not sure if that’s the case around the country, or if the delivery time varies depending on where you are.

Curious as to how long it would take, I started a timer the moment I submitted my order. Within a minute my order showed on the tracking screen that it was in the process of being packed. After about six minutes it showed as being out for delivery. As you can see in the screenshot above though, the driver might have been due to make a few other stops before delivering our order.

A minute or two before our order was delivered, I received a text from Gopuff advising that it had almost arrived. I then received a text message from the delivery driver advising that our bags were outside our room – this was just shy of 31 minutes after our order was placed, so the 20-40 minute timeline was accurate.

Overall Thoughts

I have mixed feelings about Gopuff and their new partnership with select Hyatt Place properties. On the one hand, I can see why Hyatt Place is doing this as their properties don’t usually have a pantry area with food, drinks and toiletries like some hotel brands provide. As a result, having this Gopuff partnership makes some sort of sense as it means guests can obtain those items in under 45 minutes.

I can’t help but wonder if this is a solution in search of an unsolved problem though. If you want food or drink delivered in under 45 minutes, there’s Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, Postmates, etc. If you need groceries delivered, many grocery chains offer that service either themselves or via third party services like Instacart and Shipt (albeit not within a 20-40 minute timeframe). For toiletries and similar types of items, both Uber Eats and DoorDash (and possibly other services) can often provide delivery of items from Walgreens, 7-Eleven, etc. at a cheaper cost than Gopuff charges. You can then save even more on Uber Eats, DoorDash, etc. by buying discounted gift cards for them, something which isn’t available right now for Gopuff.

The selection of items you can order from Gopuff is confusing too. The only bread they offered was made by Hostess (does it taste like Twinkies?). You can buy hot dogs but not any buns to eat them in. There’s a wide selection of organic and whole food items, but no cans of Diet Coke. There are tons of different types of tortilla chips, but no regular tortillas.

While I’m not blown away by the value provided by Gopuff (other than the $50 free credits we received 😉 ), I was impressed by the speed with which we received our order. The order was accurate too with no substitutions, so that was another positive. However, I’m struggling to think of any future scenario where I’d decide to place a Gopuff order rather than use some other service whether I was staying at a Hyatt Place or not.

Update: Reader Pauline reached out to make a good point that Gopuff doesn’t have a minimum order value, which means you could get a solitary item delivered and only have to pay a $1.95 delivery fee (plus driver tip), whereas other services like Walmart+ and Instacart have a minimum grocery order value of $35.

J.J. also pointed out in the comments that Gopuff is often available much later into the night than other services like Uber Eats and DoorDash are (seeing as the stores and/or restaurants they’d be delivering from are closed), so I can see how Gopuff might be useful for some people in certain circumstances.

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