Back in September, an online chat I hosted with Hyatt Gold Passport’s Jeff Zidell broke the news that Hyatt would be bringing the ability to search for cash and points awards online “sometime during the four quarter of 2015 or first quarter of 2016.”
That functionality is now live. Via @ismaelsaifan:
They’ve also added the ability to upgrade paid stays to a Regency Club or Grand Club room using points (but not suites, that still requires a phone call).
Club upgrades are 3000 points per night, and require paying “a minimum of the Hyatt Daily Rate deluxe room (such as partial ocean view, ocean view, slope view, etc)” at resort properties and paying the Hyatt Daily Rate (“BAR”) at non-resort properties.
Club Lounge, Grand Hyatt Kuala Lumpur
Cash and Points are a Really Valuable Feature of Gold Passport
Hyatt introduced cash and points awards at the beginning of 2014 and the unique thing about them, compared to other programs, is that they’re treated fully as paid nights. Diamond members can use confirmed suite upgrades on cash and points nights, and these award nights even count towards promotional points-earning.
View from the Grand Hyatt Hong Kong
In my view cash and points awards are a really good deal for category 2 through 6 properties, and make sense if you need stay credit for category 1 and 7 properties as well.
Putting cash and points online is a big deal, because nothing is as frustrating as actually calling and learning that what you were calling about is impossible.
Here’s how hotels decide whether to make cash and points awards available. While standard reward nights are supposed to be always available if there is inventory for a standard room at the Hyatt Daily Rate (“BAR”), cash and points are capacity controlled at the discretion of the property. Hotels are well-compensated for these nights, but if occupancy exceeds 95% they do not get their full average daily rate like they do for full awards.
Excellent news! The twitter team will be happy!
This is a big improvement
I was checking random dates for the Tokyo Andaz and didn’t see that it was available for any dates. I called Hyatt just to double check that the Tokyo Andaz participates in the Cash & Points option and they said they do. Am I just having bad luck at finding a date that has the Cash & Points option available? Capacity-controlled like you said above?
This is terrific news!!! I love cash + points!
I also prefer online booking when possible, but my experience with the Hyatt call center has been very positive. No long hold times, and the agent even waited to let my UR points transfer to continue the booking.
Gary:
I’m confused by your statement that it’s a big deal for Cash and Points Awards to be treated as paid nights.
Didn’t you do a post recently how Hyatt is the last program not to award elite night credit for award nights, after Marriott introduced this?
“Hyatt introduced cash and points awards at the beginning of 2014 and the unique thing about them, compared to other programs, is that they’re treated fully as paid nights.”
DanielM, there are other factors included in being “treated fully as paid nights,” such as earning points on the cash portion, and esp. as Gary writes, they count toward promos requiring “X number of paid nights!”
Are the upgrades available for points + cash stays?
Is this a good thing or not? I thought it would be but I just went online checking for a few destinations in March. All of the destinations I looked at didn’t seem to have a single date available in the whole month of March.
I am hoping that this is just a temporary glitch and not all of the cash and point availability is showing online. Either that or they have drastically reduced the amount of cash and point availability.
@Gary sez, with a straight face: “The unique thing about them [HGP C+P awards], compared to other programs, is that they’re treated fully as paid nights”
LOL. Although Hyatt GP was a Johnnie-Come-Lately to the C+P awards game, I knew that sooner or later some fawning, HGP kool-aid-drinking blogger would begin claiming Hyatt C+P awards as “the best in the business.”
FYI, HHonors has had C+P awards for a good while and they’ve always counted as nights or stays toward elite qualification, in addition to being fully eligible for all the other perks that an HHonors elite would get on paid nights, including complimentary suite upgrades. What’s more is that even HHonors pure points-only awards are treated as paid stays that earn elite qualification credits and elite perks (complimentary suite upgrades included)…Let’s hear you say that about HGP’s point-only awards…
Just be as happy as I am that HGP has finally joined the other major frequent-guest programs in the 21st century in allowing C+P awards to be booked online!
And, no, Hyatt GP did not invent free breakfast for elites either 😉
@DCS you’re missing that Hyatt cash and points counts towards promotional earning. And Hilton only guarantees continental breakfast…
@Gary — Huh? What the heck is a “promotional earning”? You mean what we commonly call “promos”? Whatever it is, it cannot make HGP C+ awards that “unique” or “the best in the business” , because as far as Hilton is concerned, once a paid or award (C+P or otherwise) booking has been done, there is virtually no material difference between the two types of says with respect to elite benefits (including suite upgrades) or earning points on promos, etc…
You can convince yourself, like you have with pretty everything else related to HGP, that their C+P awards are “unique” but that’s simply delusional.