One of the great joys of life is traveling. Money spent exploring the world is money well spent, but money saved while traveling is even better. One of the easiest ways to cut costs while traveling is to use your points… more importantly, your World of Hyatt points. This is literally free money you accrue just by using (and paying off) your credit card each month!
One of our favorite hotel companies to book through when traveling is Hyatt. Not only have our stays here always been more than satisfactory, we have found we love spending the points we accrue through our more mundane stays to enjoy visiting some of their luxurious properties. Compared to other hotel partners, the redemption rate for even the most posh of the Hyatt brands is beyond reasonable for what you receive in return. Hyatt’s portfolio now includes more than 1,000 properties in 69 countries. These range from boutique hotels to all-inclusive resorts and everything in between.
Rack ‘Em & Stack ‘Em
Are you dying to travel but just can’t justify spending the money? It is time for you to up your credit card game. There’s two ways to accrue points for redemption at Hyatt properties.
World of Hyatt Credit Card
There’s two ways to accrue points for redemption at Hyatt properties. The more obvious of the two is signing up for a World of Hyatt credit card. This card offers a 30,000 point sign on bonus for spending $3,000 in the first three months of opening the card. Eager spenders and travelers can accrue up to an additional 30,000 points by earning 2 bonus points per $1 spent (up to $15,000) in the first 6 months of opening your account. You also receive a free night at any Category 1–4 Hyatt hotel or resort every year on your cardmember anniversary…. ca-ching!
The more you spend with your Hyatt card, the faster you accrue points and the elite levels of World of Hyatt membership exponentially increase your benefits. You can learn more about the levels of elite membership and milestone rewards here.
Chase
Chase is the only credit card company that maintains a partnership with Hyatt for transferring point balances. In order to do so, you must have one of Chase’s premium cards: Chase Sapphire Preferred, Chase Sapphire Reserve, or Chase Ink Business Preferred. These cards offer some pretty eye catching sign-up bonuses, easily transferred they equate to a couple nights in a lux hotel. If you travel often, one of these cards may generally be a good choice for you as they also have 2 other hotel partners and 13 airline partners as well.
It Takes Money to Make Money
While there’s both nuance and simplicity to earning Hyatt points, we’re here to help you make the most of them. Here’s a handful of tips we have learned over the years. Points are free money, so you have to make the most of them!
TIP #1
For the Chase Sapphire Preferred card, a 60,000 point sign up bonus is nice, but if you’re on the fence about it, you can always wait for Chase to sweeten the pot. In 2021, with travel beginning to resume, the sign-up bonus rose up to 100,000 points for a couple months over the summer. With almost double the usual benefit, the $95 annual fee is even more worthwhile, when considering the value of that quantity of points.
TIP #2
Ready for a trip? Points burning a hole in your pocket? Being able to transfer your points opens up some exciting point-saving opportunities. Before you book anything, check both the Chase Ultimate Rewards portal as well as what it would cost you in points to book directly through Hyatt.
When booking our stay at the Grand Hyatt Kauai we noticed that booking through the Chase Ultimate Rewards account was going to cost us over 52,000 points per night, while booking through our Hyatt account would only cost 33,000 points per night (and included Grand Club Lounge access). Your Chase points transfer in a 1:1 ratio, so by transferring your points, you could be saving yourself big time!
Below we have detailed an example with the comparison for travel to the Andaz in Costa Rica. Through World of Hyatt, the room runs at 17,000 points/night, for a total of 34,000 points. By comparison, the Chase Ultimate Rewards cost is 59,132 points PLUS another $346 dollars, just for the room and an additional $96 resort fee. It’s a no-brainer that you would be so much better off transferring your points over in a case like this!
[Just an FYI, you do not need a Hyatt credit card to transfer your points to Hyatt– signing up for a World of Hyatt account is free.]
TIP #3
When you are awarded a free night’s stay, it can be tempting to use that night for any random travel you might be doing, but give it a second thought before you book. Instead, save it for booking a category three or four property to get the most “bang” for your free-night-buck.
TIP #4
Piggy-backing off that save-the-free-night-for-a- fancier-resort mentality, with Hyatt, when you book a resort entirely with points or redeem a free night, you do not have to pay a resort fee. While these fees vary from one property to another, they can add up to hundreds of dollars, depending on your length of stay.
TIP #5
If you have a World of Hyatt account, you receive a complimentary night at a category 1-4 property after you have stayed at five different brands under their Hyatt umbrella. What makes this especially enticing is that stays booked with points or other award nights are included in this count.
For example, if you used your points to book a couple nights at Andaz Maui, that would count as one of your five brands visited. This is essentially a fun game of Hyatt bingo. It certainly is not a primary factor in informing your hotel selection, butttt if you’re staying in a city with two different Hyatt brand hotels, this could be an easy deciding factor in which one to book.
TIP #6
Do you have an American Airlines AAdvantage Miles account? If you are an elite World of Hyatt member– this means you are a Discoversit, Globalist, or Explorist– you can earn 1 World of Hyatt Bonus Point for every $1 USD spent on qualifying American Airlines flights. This is *almost* like double dipping as you still received the AAdvantage miles you would already earn as an AAdvantage member. Who doesn’t want extra free points?
How Does It Stack Up?
If you are accustomed to using your points at a Hilton or Marriott hotel group, 30,000… or even 100,000 points might sound like it won’t get you very far. It’s important to recognize the difference here, because Hyatt point thresholds for redemption are much lower— for similar quality stays— as some of their competitor brands.
It’s also worth noting, if you sign up for the Chase Sapphire Preferred card and receive the 60,000 point bonus, you can transfer it to any of their three hotel partners: Hyatt, IGH, or Marriott. The points transfer in a 1:1 ratio to all companies, so unless you are highly preferential towards one of the other two brands, the 60,000 points are going to afford you more travel and luxury through Hyatt than either of the other options.
Have you ever visited a World of Hyatt resort? When we vacation, we find we enjoy adventuring around a bit more independently to truly get a feel for the culture of a given area, but we LOVE ending the last few days of vacation at a cushy Hyatt resort. Most recently, we visited the Andaz Costa Rica Resort on the Papagayo Peninsula and had a truly amazing time.
What’s your favorite World of Hyatt property? Do you have any other tips or tricks for making the most of you Hyatt points? Let us know!
Disclaimer: All photos used in this post were taken directly from the World of Hyatt or Chase website. None of these images are our own.
written by Hannah
Hannah has learned the hard way to be careful what you wish for— sometimes happily ever after lands you with a husband and puppy… in the Midwest. Despite leaving Florida to move to Wisconsin, Hannah maintains her bossy big sister role with regular phone calls to keep up with all the little sister shenanigans. Notoriously chatty with her patients as well, Hannah stays busy as a physical therapist, but loves spending weekends exploring newfound hikes.
2 replies on “Making the Most of Your Hyatt Points”
[…] and touts this as a proud accomplishment. As such, our stay at Andaz Costa Rica was actually completely paid for with points we’d accrued. Andaz CR is an Award Category 5, so if you have Hyatt points burning a hole in […]
[…] The best part about our stay here? It was completely free. We booked our room with points through Salvador’s World of Hyatt account, for a very reasonable 25k points per night. The Chase points we transferred are usually valued around 1.8 cents/point. At this conversion, the 25k point room cost us about $450 in “points”. That may seem like a hefty nightly cost, but a night at this resort usually goes for $600-$1000 per night. If you have Hyatt points to spend, this an excellent category 6 hotel to cash your points in on. New to the points game and curious how to score this room ASAP? Check out our blog post on making the most of your Hyatt points. […]