Hotel loyalty programs offer several ways for co-brand credit cardholders to earn free hotel nights. Except for the no-annual-fee cards, they’ll usually provide a free night on your card’s anniversary. This free night is usually limited to a certain category or point level, but some cards will allow you to add points to a certificate to book a more expensive hotel.
In addition, cards may offer a bonus night when you meet a yearly spending threshold. Hyatt, for example, awards a category 1-4 free night for spending $15,000 on the World of Hyatt Visa.
While I doubted my logic, I met the spending requirement and earned a category 1-4 free night. Now I have 3 free nights in my Hyatt account (including one for my account renewal and a Brand Explorer award). The problem now is finding somewhere to use them.
That’s the one flaw with Hyatt. We love their hotels but they aren’t everywhere we want to travel. When there are plenty of Hyatt hotels, like in Manhattan, all of them are category 5 or higher. That’s why I try to use free night certificates when possible because you have to use them within 1 year.
When searching for an upcoming trip, I found a Category 4 Hyatt that met our needs and had free nights available.
I wanted to use two free night certificates but it’s not easy on Hyatt’s website. There’s a workaround using the “Pay My Way” feature where you can choose between using cash, points, cash+points or free night certificates.
I had the option to pay for the room, which after taxes and a $20 destination fee would have totaled $946.34
Or I could use my two free night certificates and pay nothing (Hyatt waives the destination fee/resort fee on award stays.)
Some quick math shows that I earned 3% back, $473/$15,000, with the free night certificate, on top of the 20K Hyatt points I earned using my World of Hyatt card.
I also saved $473 by paying the $95 annual fee for the World of Hyatt card.
I took a risk by moving expenses to my Hyatt card to earn an additional free night. I thought I could find a good use for it but I wasn’t sure. Maybe I was lucky.
What’s your best use for a Hyatt category 1-4 free night certificate?
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1 comment
The Park Hyatt Saigon was my best use of a category 1-4 certificate. I didn’t check out-the-door prices but I think the base was in the $300’s. There’s some substantial value to be had with Hyatt although they really need to bump these certificates up to category 1-5 given the inflation of categories they’ve introduced in the past several years. Remember when there were only about a half dozen top level category 7 hotels in the entire chain? Seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it?