The Park Hyatt New York was one of the most anticipated hotel openings last year. A new luxury property in New York, you can expect to pay a minimum in the high $600s per night on prepaid rates when the hotel expects to be relatively empty.

It’s a Hyatt Gold Passport category 7 hotel, meaning 30,000 points per night. The problem has been that getting reward nights at that hotel has been a challenge. The hotel opened before all of its rooms were fully online, and there’s a limited number of ‘standard’ rooms there eligible for points redemptions.

In fact, only about 12% of the hotel’s rooms are considered ‘standard’ — a practice I consider to be quite dirty pool.

Fortunately award availability appears to be thawing there.

I’m finally finding free night awards available, and not just for one or two days booked about a year out.

There’s plenty of award nights both during the week and over weekends.

For two night Friday through Sunday stays, over the next five months I found:

• Available this coming weekend
  
• Available every weekend in May
  
• Not available in June (one weekend has only Diamond guaranteed availability at over $1400 per night and is otherwise sold out)
  
• Available weekends of July 11 and 18 except over July 4
  
• The first 3 weekends in August are available

Interestingly one of the cheapest paid rates I found was over the last weekend in August, though that was for the ‘Park Deluxe King’ room type which isn’t the base level room — Park King rooms need to be available in order to use points.

Cash and points awards are available too, but I do not consider that a good value for category 7 properties (since you’re effectively buying back points at 2 cents apiece and I value them at 1.4 cents).

Personally I’m more than happy at the category 6 Andaz 5th Avenue, so I doubt I’ll be checking out the Park Hyatt soon.

(HT: Jenn T.)