Using hotel free-night certificates should be one of the easiest points-and-miles redemptions to book. Find an eligible hotel, confirm that a standard room is available, and book the stay. At least, that is how it is supposed to work.
We have two World of Hyatt Free Night Awards from the World of Hyatt Credit Card, each valid for a night at a participating Category 1-4 Hyatt hotel. Since we’re planning a trip to Montreal, I thought this would be a simple way to cover a two-night stay.
Montreal has two Hyatt properties downtown: the Hyatt Place Montreal – Downtown and the Hyatt Centric Montreal. Both are Category 3 properties, which means they are eligible for our certificates.
When I searched for a two-night stay, both hotels showed up. Both were available for cash. But neither would let me book the stay using our Free Night Awards.
That’s where this went from mildly disappointing to extremely frustrating, because each hotel had a completely different reason as to why I couldn’t book.
What A Hyatt Free Night Award Is Supposed To Cover
The World of Hyatt Credit Card provides an annual Free Night Award valid at a Category 1-4 Hyatt hotel or resort. Cardholders can also earn another Category 1-4 award after spending $15,000 on the card in a calendar year.
Hyatt says members can redeem awards for free nights in standard rooms without blackout dates. The important part of that sentence is standard rooms. A hotel doesn’t have to make every available room bookable with points or a Free Night Award. It only needs to make a standard room available for an award redemption when that room type is available.
That rule is understandable. However, the way it worked at these two Montreal hotels made it unnecessarily difficult to use our certificates.
Hyatt Centric Montreal: Rooms Available, But Not The Right Room
The Hyatt Centric Montreal was the easier problem to understand, even though it was no less irritating.
When searching for an award stay, the hotel showed no points or Free Night Award availability for our dates. When searching for a paid stay, the reason became clear: the hotel’s base-level room, listed as a 1 King Bed, wasn’t available.
Since that’s apparently the room Hyatt Centric Montreal considers its standard room, there was no standard award availability.
Technically, that fits Hyatt’s rules. If the standard room is unavailable, the hotel doesn’t have to allow a Free Night Award booking in another room category.
But here is where it gets aggravating. The hotel has several types of king rooms, including a 1 King City View room and a 1 King Courtyard View room. Both of which sell for the exact same price as the standard king room rate shown for the hotel: CA$358 for the member rate or CA$365 for the standard rate.
I understand that a Free Night Award only covers a standard room. But when a hotel has multiple king rooms available for the exact same cash price as the room designated as “standard,” refusing to make any of them available for an award stay feels like hiding behind a room classification rather than dealing with a meaningful difference in room value.
Whether that’s a decision made by the hotel or simply the way Hyatt’s award inventory system is set up, the result is the same. Hyatt Centric Montreal had rooms it was willing to sell me for cash, but none it was willing to let me book with the Hyatt benefits I had earned.
When a hotel handles award availability that way, my reaction is not to shrug and pay cash. It makes me want to book somewhere else and let them keep the room empty.
Hyatt Place Montreal: The Standard Room Was Available, Until It Wasn’t
The Hyatt Place Montreal – Downtown was a different story, and arguably the more frustrating one.
This hotel did appear to have its standard room available for awards. When I searched for a single night, Hyatt showed a room with 2 Queen Beds available using a Free Night Award.
I checked the other night separately. The same standard 2 Queen Beds room was also available using a Free Night Award.
So this should have been straightforward:
- We had two valid Category 1-4 Free Night Awards.
- Hyatt Place Montreal – Downtown is a Category 3 hotel.
- The same standard room was available for an award on night one.
- The same standard room was available for an award on night two.
- We wanted to book those two nights consecutively.
Yet when I searched for a two-night stay, Hyatt told me there were no rooms available using points or Free Night Awards.
It became even more confusing when Hyatt’s own points calendar showed both nights as available for awards. In other words, Hyatt appeared to know that each individual night was available, but its booking engine wouldn’t let me reserve the same room for the two-night stay.
There Wasn’t Even A Pay My Way Option
Hyatt sometimes offers a feature called Pay My Way, where members can combine different payment types across a stay. In theory, that might allow someone to apply one Free Night Award to each individual night within a single reservation.
That wasn’t an option here. When I looked at the available cash rates, Pay My Way didn’t appear for this booking.
Yes, I could book the two nights separately using one certificate for each reservation and then contact the hotel to have the reservations linked. Since both nights show the same standard room type, that would presumably be the practical workaround.
But why should I have to do that?
This isn’t a complicated redemption involving multiple hotels, different room types or a combination of cash and points. I had two certificates. The hotel had the same eligible room available for two consecutive nights. Hyatt’s website should have allowed me to book a two-night stay.
Final Thought
I can probably still use our two Hyatt Free Night Awards at the Hyatt Place Montreal – Downtown by booking each night separately and asking the hotel to connect the reservations. But that shouldn’t be necessary.
This was supposed to be a simple redemption: two certificates, two nights and two Category 3 hotels in the part of Montreal where we wanted to stay. Instead, one hotel had rooms available for cash but not awards because only its designated base room counted, while the other showed the same standard award room available one night at a time, but not for a two-night reservation.
Free Night Awards are a useful benefit when they work. But booking two consecutive nights with two available certificates shouldn’t require this much effort.
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