Tips to Use Your Points for Hyatt (our favorite use for Chase points)

Welcome back to Points for Normal People . I'm Katie and I'm here because I know that travel costs add up , especially for a family , but I believe that travel isn't just for the rich .

That's why , on Points for Normal People , I share the tips and tricks that our family has been using for over a decade using credit card welcome offers to supercharge your travel points so that you can travel more for less money . Saying that I love Hyatt is in no way revolutionary , nor does it set me apart from any other Points blogger or creator .

Hyatt is a very popular hotel loyalty program in the Points world , for good reason . It consistently provides good value , the Points are fairly easy to earn and overall , you generally get a good experience with Hyatt as a chain .

Today I want to do a bit of a deeper dive into Hyatt , because it's one of the most popular ways that you can use your ultimate rewards points and , as you know , in season one we're diving into all the things Chase Ultimate Rewards points . Chase Ultimate Rewards are also the only major points currency that transfers to Hyatt .

So when we get into airlines , which will be starting in a few weeks , there's a lot more overlap for a lot of airlines , especially the foreign-based airlines .

There are lots of ways where you can earn points that transfer , to Flying Blue , for instance , which is the airline program of Air France and KLM , and it's a popular flight redemption option for going to Europe . So while you can transfer ultimate rewards to Flying Blue , there are also lots of other ways to get Flying Blue miles too .

With Hyatt , though , you're pretty much going to need to be earning ultimate rewards points from Chase . Now , quick caveat that you can earn something called Built Rewards Points and transfer those to Hyatt . Built offers a credit card that allows you to pay your rent without paying a fee and earn points on your rent if you jump through a few more hoops .

If you're a renter in a high-cost housing market , this credit card might make sense for you , but the built card doesn't offer any welcome offers . So it's hard to accumulate points with built unless you have a high rent payment . Mostly , though , you'll earn Hyatt points by earning Chase Ultimate Rewards .

Later in this season , we will talk about how to keep earning Ultimate Rewards forever . I go into this a bit in my three-year plan , which plots out for you how to keep earning lots of Ultimate Rewards in your first three years . But for a quick overview , the Chase Sapphire Preferred isn't the only card that can allow you to earn Ultimate Rewards .

You can also earn them from Chase Freedom cards there are two that you can get right now and Chase Ink cards there are three of those , so there are lots of card options here .

If you're in a two player household , you're also fortunate , because all these cards I just mentioned that earn ultimate rewards points and have good welcome offers also offer referral bonuses , so you'll be able to refer back and forth with a spouse or a partner , and so , in addition to earning a welcome offer , you'll also be able to earn a referral bonus , which

is more points . There is also a personal Hyatt card for as far as earning Hyatt points , though this one never has a very exciting welcome offer , but there's still reasons to get it , which I'll talk a little bit about later , and there's a business Hyatt card .

So you can see there are lots of options for earning points , especially ultimate rewards points that transfer to Hyatt , and that's one reason why this is a great hotel program for beginners and more advanced travel points people , because you can keep earning the points .

Keep in mind that when you transfer points from Chase Ultimate Rewards to Hyatt , they're stuck with Hyatt . You can't reverse that . I don't personally consider this to be a problem , as there's always a Hyatt I will book down the road , but it is something to be aware of .

Another reason this is a popular chain to book with points is that Hyatt is also one of the few hotel chains left that has very predictable award pricing . This makes it really easy to plan a trip and budget your points for it .

The way that Hyatt works hotels are assigned categories , from 1 to 8 . These are loosely connected with how expensive a hotel is in cash , but not totally . A category 1 hotel is the cheapest with points . The standard rate for a category 1 hotel is 5,000 points per night .

So that's true of every Category 1 hotel , no matter where it is in the world , no matter what the cash price is . These go all the way up to Category 8 . A Category 8 hotel costs 40,000 points per night . Hyatt has a separate chart for all-inclusive hotels too . That's based on the alphabet and goes from Category A to F With all-inclusive they .

That's based on the alphabet and goes from category A to F With all-inclusive . They start at a higher price point . So a category A is 15,000 points per night , all the way up to a category F at 50,000 points per night .

For any given Hyatt hotel you can look up its category and know what the price is a year in advance and that's really nice for planning purposes . A few years ago Hyatt introduced peak , off-peak and standard pricing , so it's just one level of variability .

Hotels have peak and off-peak dates set a year in advance and you can find them when you're looking at a hotel on the Hyatt website . It'll say points calendar . To clarify , you cannot see the calendar of peak and off-peak dates when you search for a Hyatt hotel via the app . This is only available in the web browser of your phone or your computer .

Keep this in mind for planning because if your dates are really flexible you can look up off-peak dates and plan around those . If you have a specific hotel in mind For some reference , a Category 1 hotel , as I mentioned before , costs 5,000 points per night at the standard rate .

Off-peak it would cost 3,500 points per night and peak pricing is 6,500 points per night . And peak pricing is 6,500 points per night At the top of the award chart , category eight will cost 40,000 points per night . Peak pricing is 5,000 points more and off peak pricing is 5,000 points less .

One of the advantages to having these award categories is that it's a lot easier to plan and save for a trip because you can have a specific points target that you're striving to meet . Now , every March Hyatt will do some reshuffling and move hotels up and down in categories .

My understanding is that this is partly to do with how popular they are for points redemptions . So the Hyatt Ziva Cancun , which has been one of our favorites for a long time , has been steadily moving up the award chart . For many years it was 25,000 points per night .

Then they added peak pricing and it cost us 29,000 points per night to go in January , which is when we like to go . Then it moved to a higher category and was going to cost 45,000 points per night for January stays and as of this year it now sits at that January pricing for 58,000 points per night . Yikes right .

That hotel became very popular to book with points and it's a supply and demand issue , so they're going to keep raising the price if people are still booking it . In fact , they raised it so much that we probably won't go back with our Hyatt points . Before you start to worry that you'll never get a good deal , let me assure you you will .

I've been doing this for 10 years and I've seen that there's always a deal to be had . While some hotels will always go up in price , it's also become more easy to earn points . The welcome offer on the ink cards , for instance , used to always be 50,000 points .

In recent years , we've seen these offers go up to as much as 90,000 points , so it's become easier to earn them . Besides these predictable pricing categories , hyatt has some other great perks when booking with points . When you book with Hyatt points , you won't pay any resort fees or taxes . The tax part is true of pretty much any hotel chain .

Typically , when you book with hotel points , you won't have to pay taxes , but waiving the resort fees is not the norm and other chains like IHG and Marriott will charge you the resort fee even when you pay with points , and at some properties , the resort fees can be $50 a day or more .

With Hyatt , the resort fee is always waived for points stays and you still get any benefits associated with the resort fees . So at the Hyatt Place Waikiki , for instance , the resort fee covers amenities like borrowing beach chairs and sand toys for free . So you still get those benefits included .

Hyatt hotels always disclose what is covered by the resort fees and I always like to check the fine print because sometimes the hotel front desk won't necessarily offer this information at check-in . When you're booking a Hyatt hotel , you should see a little disclaimer about the resort fee and a link to view inclusions .

So when I click this for that hotel I just mentioned , hyatt Place Waikiki it actually gives a long list , including a tote bag , discount rates for some , luau's , use of boogie boards , a laymaking class on Wednesdays and Fridays and more . So be sure to check to see what's included .

Let's talk a little bit about how you might find Hyatt's you want to stay at and how to book properties that are really popular and may sell out . Really . The best search tool is to use the Hyatt website . If you Google Hyatt map , you'll get a map on the Hyatt website with all of their hotels .

You can filter this by hotel category if you want to stick to a particular budget , or you can select other filters like hotel brands or pool or resort property .

Typically , resort properties are going to have more amenities and often even some included activities throughout the day , or at least on certain days , and often even some included activities throughout the day , or at least on certain days . If you want a hotel for a bigger family , you'll want to focus in on Hyatt Place hotels .

Hyatt Place has a pretty standard two-queen room with a sofa bed that sleeps six throughout the US . In the US , hyatt Place also includes breakfast , so it's a great option for families . You can find Hyatt Place hotels in Waikiki , in Chicago , on the beach , in Florida near Arches National Park and in a lot of other places .

We've stayed at quite a few , even in Winnipeg , canada , the last time we visited Micah's sister . But just as a quick aside , hyatt Place outside the United States , especially in Europe , is different .

We stayed at a Hyatt Place by the London Heathrow Airport that only slept two people and didn't include breakfast , so the brand is quite different in other countries .

The map on the Hyatt website , though , overall is going to be the best way to start your search for a Hyatt hotel , then I'd suggest that you start to look up reviews at specific properties , if you find a few you like .

We honestly don't look up too many reviews before we stay at a Hyatt because there's just such a good overall quality that I don't always feel the need to look at the reviews for a specific hotel . Beyond the map feature on the Hyatt website , you also might find some inspiration by looking at other people's trip reports and seeing where they have gone .

At the end of this season I'll have some episodes where people can share some of their favorite ultimate rewards redemptions , and that will be a good way to browse too .

When we stay at a Hyatt , I typically do some stories on Instagram and save these as a highlight to my profile with the destination name , so you can browse those as well if that interests you . Some recent ones I have saved are Andaz Mayakoba in the Riviera Maya . Hyatt Regency Merida , which is in Mexico .

Hyatt's in Tokyo and Fukuoka , japan and Ziva Cancun , mexico . Hyatt's in Tokyo and Fukuoka , japan and Ziva , cancun . But overall for browsing , I think that going to a computer and going to the Hyatt map on the Hyatt website is the best starting place .

There is one type of stay , though , that Hyatt does not make easy to search on their website , and it also happens to be one of our favorite kinds of stays . These are for Hyatts that have club lounges .

Club lounges , when they are available at a hotel and the hotels that have them are pretty limited typically include a lounge area that will serve breakfast and also what is called cocktail hour , but essentially is dinner . If you're in a room that is designated as having club lounge access , you get to enjoy the lounge .

We really like club lounges for family travel because it helps us simplify our trip planning and gives us a good rhythm . So when we stay at a place with a club lounge , we usually wake up and go and eat breakfast in the lounge .

Then we'll go out and explore for the day and eat lunch out somewhere , and then we come back for cocktail hour for dinner and then we relax the rest of the night at the hotel . It means we're spending less on food and we're also spending less time researching where to eat , and we found that most club lounges include some local food .

So we enjoyed some great Japanese food in Japan at the club lounges and some great Mexican food at the club lounge in Merida Mexico . Unlike most other hotel programs , hyatt allows you to use a few more points to get one of these club lounge access rooms . So for a category one hotel that's usually 5,000 points , it costs 6,500 to book a club access room .

There are also a few other ways to access the lounge which I want to mention too , because we are such a fan of these . The first is the least likely for most people , so you also get club lounge access automatically if you have Hyatt's highest level of elite status , which is called globalist .

This won't be relevant to most beginners unless you happen to be a business traveler . For most people , chasing globalist status won't make sense , but occasionally status match offers may make it easier to earn . Again , it usually takes a fair amount of effort and points and travel to earn this .

Now I'm a bit of a hypocrite here , because this is how we personally get club access . We got sucked into earning globalist status , even though I think it's a bit overhyped , but at this point we have enough points backlog that for us personally it's not a big deal for us to keep earning it .

So the way we do this won't be the way that most people get club access . A more typical way would be this If you start to travel a little bit more , you may get to earn the perk of earning two club access awards .

That's because Hyatt also has these extra rewards , called milestone rewards , which are awarded after you say a certain number of nights at a Hyatt . You get what's called one elite night credit for each night that you stay .

An elite night credit just means that they're tracking the nights that you've stayed with Hyatt , and for Hyatt it tracks if you paid with points or cash . So either one tracks . If you get to 20 elite night credits within a calendar year , you get a perk which is two club access certificates .

Each of these can then be used to upgrade a stay that you have if you're staying at a Hyatt that has a club lounge , one that normally you'd have to pay more points to access the club lounge . So you get two of these at 20 nights , and each certificate is good for a stay of up to seven nights long .

These club access certificates are particularly valuable at the higher-end Hyatts with club lounges , so some really popular places to use them would be the Grand Hyatt Kauai or the Hyatt Regency Maui , because this way you can get free breakfast and free dinner for your whole family . The Hyatt Regency in Maui , for instance , usually costs 30,000 points per night .

If you book a club access room , it would cost 39,000 points per night . So 9,000 points more per night , which I still think could be worth it . But if you were staying for four nights and could use a club access certificate instead of paying 39,000 extra points per night , that's like saving 36,000 points and you can book an extra night .

If you're interested in trying to earn some club access awards , you'll have to stay 20 nights at Hyatt in a calendar year . So that's quite a bit . But you can get a little boost if you hold a Hyatt personal card . With that card they add five elite night credits to your account at the beginning of the year , so you really only need to stay 15 nights .

As I said , it's really hard to search on the Hyatt site and know which Hyatts actually have club lounges . So last year I had my team work on a project to go through all the Hyatts systematically around the world and find all the ones that have club lounges and put them on a custom Google map . That map is embedded on a page on my blog .

If Hyatt Club lounges interest . You check out the link in the show notes for this map . Another reason I like the Hyatt program for booking hotels with points is that you can choose to book straight into a suite if it's available .

It will typically cost about double what a standard room will cost and for many of you that won't be worth it , but it's a good option to have and to know about . For some stays and for many of you that won't be worth it , but it's a good option to have and to know about for some stays and for some stays it might be worth it .

In Paris , for instance , there's a Hyatt Regency where the only room that sleeps a family of four is a suite and as an added perk the suite gives you club lounge access . So in this case it could be worth it . You pay double but you get a room that sleeps four and you get free breakfast and free dinner included .

Or on a category one hotel , it might be worth it because it doesn't cost too much more . At the Hyatt Regency in Merida Mexico , it's currently a category one property , so the standard suite costs 8,000 points per night and , just like in Paris , that suite also includes club lounge access .

We stayed there earlier in 2024 and it was a great property and there's so much to do in Merida . We'd highly recommend that hotel . Not all suites include club access , but some do , and sometimes you just get a fancier and bigger room with a separate living room , which is nice too .

Hyatt also has the most all-inclusive options to book with points of any chain . Now I will say the pricing can be a bit steep on the all-inclusives and it seems to be going up and up every year , but if you want a fully all-inclusive vacation that you paid for with points , there are a lot of options .

I want to wrap up by giving a few strategy tips for how to find availability with Hyatt Hotels . There are a few reasons that you might be trying to book a Hyatt Hotel with points and finding an error screen that says this hotel isn't currently accepting bookings with points .

The good news is that this message isn't the end of the story and there are a lot of ways that you may be able to still book that hotel with points . The first reason this might happen is that you are searching for too many people .

Hyatt hotels only have to make one type of standard room available to book with points . So if a hotel has some rooms that have one king bed and so they only sleep two and they have some two queen bedrooms . They might just designate the one king bedrooms as the standard room that is bookable with points .

If you go to search and enter in two adults and two children , but this hotel only has the king bedroom with an occupancy of two , it will just tell you that it isn't bookable with points at all .

If a hotel comes up as unavailable and you are searching for three or more people , the first step that you should take is to search again for two people and see if the hotel then shows availability . If it does show available rooms for two people but not for three or four or five , here's what to do .

My first step is to do a cash search for the same hotel to see if they have other rooms that are similar in price but would more easily fit our family . So maybe a king room is $150 a night and the two queen room is $160 a night .

If I find this , I typically book the hotel for two people and then message the hotel directly or call them and ask if they can move us to a different room type . If you booked a standard room . They aren't going to just move you to a suite , just move you to a suite .

But if you booked a one king bedroom and you can see that they have two queen rooms available , there's a decent chance that they'll be willing to move you over to a different room type . Typically , the worst case scenario is they just may charge you the price difference of $10 or whatever it is .

If it's within the US and the room type will work for you as is like the one king bed is fine . We typically just book the room for two people and then we would just have one adult check in and the other adult waits outside with the kids and once we have our room key , we would just go up discreetly together .

The only place that sneaking an extra kid into a hotel room doesn't work is one all-inclusive hotels , because they typically need to see all of your passports . Two , hotel resorts with wristbands and generally hotels in Europe . For number three , specifically , hotels in Europe are going to be much stricter about occupancy , with fire codes .

Now I can tell you that we did have four people in the two-person room at the Hyatt Place in the London Heathrow Airport and that day anyway , the hotel didn't mind , but I don't necessarily recommend this .

We were prepared to have to book another room if we had to , so that first step if a hotel comes up as unavailable is to check the same hotel for a lower number of people , is to check the same hotel for a lower number of people . The next step is to check for a minimum night stay requirement .

Minimum night stay requirements is another game that hotels play to avoid having to let people book with points . The worst that I'm aware of is the Ondas Maui , which sometimes has an eight-night minimum stay . If you're booking with points , you can test your dates by trying to book a longer stay and see if that now comes up as available .

If it does , there are a few strategies you can use . First of all , you can just book the longer stay if you have the points , and then you can call Hyatt or message them on Twitter or X and know that their agents are very responsive there and ask to shorten your stay . This typically gets around the minimum night stay requirement .

Some hotels have minimum night requirements for certain seasons but not others . In that case , you can also often book the same number of nights that you want , but for totally different dates the dates that don't have the minimum night stay requirement , and then you can call or message Hyatt and ask to change the dates to the ones you want .

That second one is the one my family had to do the last time we booked Hyatt Ziva Cancun . Our January dates were coming up with a five to six night minimum , but we only wanted four nights . So we booked a four night stay in early March and then asked customer service to change our dates to January . You can call or send a message on Twitter or X .

If you're thinking that you don't have an X account , well , let me tell you I opened one for the only purpose of messaging Hyatt . That's the only thing I do on there . The last thing that you can do if you're getting the message that a hotel is not available to book with points is to use a point searching service . This could also be your first step .

Honestly , it's typically my first step . My current favorite service is MaxMyPoint . This lets you see the Hyatt award availability for a specific property with a calendar view , because at some point popular Hyatt hotels will sell out of standard rooms and won't be bookable with points , and so on those days they're truly unbookable . To get around this .

You'll want to book as far out as possible if you're going to popular places , or if you're like me and you don't like planning far in advance , you can use Max my Point to set up alerts , because when someone cancels a room , it generally goes back into the system and becomes bookable with points again .

I just did this on a big scale for an extended family trip that we have later this year to the Andaz Papagayo , which is in Costa Rica . My parents and siblings and their families and us all decided to go to celebrate my parents' 50th wedding anniversary .

But the Andaz Papagayo is a pretty popular hotel and we were trying to book four rooms over a holiday week .

Still , I was feeling optimistic , so I upgraded my Max my Point subscription for a few months to a level where I could get more alerts basically all the alerts I needed and I just set alerts for when any room became available on our dates at the Andaz Papagayo and then , as they did , I booked them one by one .

It took two months for me to get all the rooms , but I did it . We're all booked now and ready to go . For reference , I started that process about nine months before we were planning to go . So still , for me , that's planning way in advance .

The fact is that even at highly popular hotels , a lot of people still cancel rooms and those rooms go back into the inventory and can be bookable with points again . The easiest way to find them is to use a service like Max my Point instead of just searching every day on your own . And specifically I , when I need it .

I pay for an upgrade if you have a month when you're trying to set a lot of alerts . If you want to learn more about Hyatt , I have a free download in the show notes . That's a PDF guide that covers the basics . I also have a whole lecture on Hyatt in my free course . So that's your action step for today to download the guide as a reference .

As a second step , if you don't have a World of Hyatt account , I'd also encourage you to sign up for one now . That's because if you wait to sign up for an account until you're ready to transfer your chase points to Hyatt , sometimes they will hold the points for up to a week in limbo before fully transferring them .

If it's a new account , it's better to do it now and have it done so you're prepared . It doesn't cost anything to create a World of Hyatt account . The name on the Hyatt account will need to match the name on the Sapphire Preferred account in order to transfer points , so make sure this will match up .

Whoever holds the Sapphire Preferred should also open the Hyatt account in your household . Shout out to Amy , who left such a kind review of the podcast . She titled it Finally I Get it . And she wrote after years of following other accounts on social media and even having friends try to explain the travel hotel point system , katie has done it .

She's so clear and tells you exactly what to do . She's also so comforting , like you can do it .

I cannot recommend this podcast enough . Thank you so much , amy , for taking the time to review the podcast , and I'm so glad that it's starting to click for you . I really do think that everyone can learn media , where I had gained a following of over 100,000 people to a brand new form of content in a podcast .

But one of the reasons I did it was that when I re-evaluated my goals for my business , one of my biggest goals is to teach these concepts clearly for beginners so that they can start earning and redeeming points with confidence , and a podcast offers a much more linear way to learn . It means so much to me when you leave a review , so thank you .

Thanks so much for spending time with me today . I look forward to seeing you next time when we will continue to unlock these secrets of travel points together .