Hyatt’s Destination Residences bookable with points! (and a new award type: Premium Room)

Hyatt’s Destination brand is made up of Destination hotels & resorts and Destination Residences vacation rentals.  Destination hotels were already bookable with Hyatt points.  Previously, though, most Destination Residences were either not bookable with points or the room types that were bookable with points were extremely limited.  That’s starting to change.  It is now possible to book Destination Residences’ condos with points: mostly in Colorado and Hawaii so far.

New Redemption Options

Hyatt offers up to four room types for award bookings at their hotels:

• Standard Room
• Regency/Grand Club Room (these are basically the same as standard rooms but include hotel lounge access)
• Standard Suite
• Premium Suite

Now, for the purpose of booking vacation rental properties, they’ve introduced the concept of a “Premium Room”.  These appear to be priced the same as Regency/Grand Club rooms.  After looking at a number of properties, I found that most mapped the room types as follows:

• Standard Room: A studio or 1 bedroom unit.
• Premium Room: A one or two bedroom unit, usually with a view or other desirable feature.
• Standard Suite: A two or three bedroom unit
• Premium Suite: A two, three, or four bedroom unit, usually with a view or other desirable feature.

Updated Award Chart

The following chart shows current point prices for free nights at Hyatt hotels, resorts, and residences.  The column between “Standard Room” and “Standard Suite” shows the award price of Premium Rooms when available or club rooms at Hyatt Regency and Grand Hyatt properties:

Note that the above award chart will not display correctly within an email client.  Please view this post in a web browser instead (click here to open this post in a browser).

Hyatt’s Destination Residences: A dangerous precedent?

View from the Wing points out that some Destination by Hyatt Residences do not have any standard rooms defined.  Instead, their base units are premium rooms or suites.  He argues that this is setting a dangerous precedent because, until now, even all-suite properties had suites that were classified as standard rooms for the purpose of award pricing.  His worry, I think, is that this may become a way for properties to charge higher award prices for their rooms.

Personally, I’m not worried about it.  Perhaps I’m being naïve, but here are my thoughts about it:

1. It’s totally reasonable for Destination Residences to work differently.  Some Residences appear to be much more like entire houses than hotel rooms.  I think its fair for such units to be classified in a higher category than “standard room”.
2. The World of Hyatt program has demonstrated time and again good faith towards their members.  I’m willing to bet that they’ll continue to handle all-suites resorts more like hotels, with standard room awards, rather than like vacation rentals.
3. I love that Hyatt found a way to map multi-bedroom vacation rentals into their existing award pricing scheme.  It gives us many more options for using points at properties that otherwise wouldn’t be accessible at all!
4. I don’t know whether Hyatt will extend the “premium room” concept to their hotel brands.  If so, this could be a good thing: it would mean, for example, that we might be able to book ocean-front rooms at resorts that don’t currently classify them as standard rooms.  But it could also backfire if/when some resorts reclassify a number of their standard rooms as premium rooms.

Participating Destination by Hyatt Residences

Earlier this year, Hyatt introduced expanded redemption options at a small number of Destination by Hyatt residences:

• Resort at Squaw Creek in Olympic Valley, California
• The Lodge at Spruce Peak in Stowe, Vermont
• Vail Residences at Cascade Village in Vail, Colorado

Apparently the above additions went well because Hyatt has now announced many more Destination by Hyatt residences with expanded redemption options:

Your thoughts?

What do you think of the latest changes?  Are you excited by the new possibilities?  Are you worried about how this will effect award pricing elsewhere?  Please comment below.

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