How to find hidden Hyatt reward availability

Hyatt is generally quite good with reward availability, since as long as a standard room is for sale it should be available for redeeming with points too (not applicable to Small Luxury Hotels). However sometimes it may still be difficult to find availability at certain hotels, and today we’ll talk about a couple of tricks that are helpful.

Take Hyatt Centric Waikiki Beach for example, which is a hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii. The problem is, they are blocking standard rooms at the moment, and you must book at least 5 consecutive nights to be able to see them and thereafter redeem standard awards.

Here is what you see when booking 4 nights:

And when booking 5 nights:

Which means, if you want to stay four nights only or less, you are stuck unless you are willing to pay more for a suite.

[Book and Delete]

The first trick is, book five nights on points, and then delete the first or last night(s) you don’t want. By doing this you basically circumvent the minimum-night stay requirement imposed by the hotel.

Note that you can’t possibly manage it yourself. You must phone World of Hyatt’s hotline for help.

[Pay My Way]

The only trouble with the approach above is you need enough points in your account to make the placeholder booking in the first place. There’s a further trick to work around it.

First of all, switch from View Points to View Rates and assuming that you are signed-in, you should see the option to Use Pay My way:

Click it and then you can customise the payment methods for your stay. Let’s say your desired stay dates are 11-14 November, choose to pay cash for the first two nights and points for the next three.

Then it’s the same story – call Hyatt’s customer service to delete the first two nights. This way you don’t need more points than you actually pay, unlike in Book and Delete.

And this concludes my blog post. The question, of course, is whether Hyatt’s call centre is able or happy to delete the nights as you request. This is not something I can guarantee, however from the many data points that I have seen, it is absolute doable at least for now, although you may need to try HUACA if unlucky.