Park Hyatt New York Finally Making Reward Night Reservations Consistently Available

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.)

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. I noticed this a few weeks ago, and will be at PHNY 4/23-26 on points. I’m sorta trying to visit as many of them as I can, so I’m looking forward to it.

    My only concern is that the breakfast options look extraordinarily weak for a Park Hyatt. Maybe I’m spoiled by the unbelievable buffets in Shanghai and Seoul, or the excellent menus in Hadahaa or Istanbul, but the menu for the restaurant looks quite mundane. I’m pretty sure “The Backroom Breakfast for Two” is not offered as part of the included Diamond amenity…

  2. The Backroom breakfast for 2 is included in the diamond breakfast because it is $38/pp and diamond breakfast covers up to $45/pp.

  3. The biggest issue with Hyatt is “standard rooms” This applies tomany of their properties the same way.

  4. I’m back from my stay and wrote a longer review over in the FT thread — the Park Hyatt is a very nice property and the restaurant breakfast options are actually quite excellent, especially since they’ve unbundled the ridiculous Backroom Breakfast and you can order the Kobe A5 or the Foie Gras as a normal breakfast item. The Diamond benefit is the price of the 57th Street Breakfast, which was $38 at the time, but it was not automatically applied and had to be fixed up at checkout. The FT thread notes that PHNY is not acting consistent with GP policy toward Diamond customers in general.

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