Two steps forward and one step sideways with Hyatt awards

I’ve seen a number of people write about two big improvements to the World of Hyatt award booking system: during the reservation process, Guest of Honor Awards (giving the guest Globalist privileges during their stay) and Suite Upgrade Awards can now be selected and applied online while make an all-cash or all-points reservation.

Previously, these awards could only be applied over the phone after a reservation had been made. Unfortunately, these awards still cannot be combined with each other or with Pay Your Way reservations, either online or over the phone. Let’s discuss.

“Pay Your Way” lets you use points, cash, and free night awards on a single reservation

I use this feature all the time, but it doesn’t offer any special value except convenience: most chains require you to “check out” and “check back in” when you move between different payment types and reservation channels, but as long as you’re booking through Hyatt you can combine points, cash, and free night awards however you like, as long as the same rate and room type is available for each night, saving you (or, God forbid, a loved one) a trip or two to the front desk during your stay to remake your keys.

That lets you use cash for the nights that are cheapest with cash, points for the nights that are cheapest with points, and free night awards for the most expensive nights (since Hyatt free night awards are classified by property category, not specific point values).

Again, this does not save you any money, points, or awards, as long as each of the nights is available on its own, although it may help you meet a minimum stay requirement during especially busy times if a property won’t let you book the nights individually.

Suite Upgrade Awards and Guest of Honor awards can be used online but can’t be combined with free night awards (or each other)

What many people have been talking about is the ability to apply Suite Upgrade Awards and Guest of Honor awards online at the time of booking. This is fine and good, but it’s only half the story.

As a reminder, Suite Upgrade Awards allow you to confirm an upgrade to a property’s entry-level suite, if available at time of booking. Previously, these awards had to be redeemed by calling into Hyatt. Now, there’s a radio button to click that lets you see if there’s an available suite and redeem the award for it during the booking process.

Guest of Honor awards give the guest (including yourself, if applicable), World of Hyatt Globalist status benefits during a stay, the most important of which are generally considered to be free breakfast, free valet parking (on award stays), waived resort fees, late checkout, and suite upgrades, if available at check-in.

So while it’s obviously not especially common, you can imagine a situation where you might want to apply a Suite Upgrade Award to a Guest of Honor booking, since the benefits are very slightly different. You want your in-laws to have free breakfast and late check-out but you also want to make sure they get a suite for their gazillionth anniversary instead of counting on hope or an e-mail to the general manager.

That’s not possible, since only one award can be applied to a reservation.

The problem and the easiest workarounds

That’s an extreme case, but a much more obvious situation is a Globalist or friend-of-a-Globalist trying to apply a Suite Upgrade Award to a Pay Your Way reservation, which happens to be the precise situation I found myself in the other week. I’d identified an upcoming Category 7 Andaz stay as a perfect redemption storm: a Category 1-7 free night award for the most expensive night and points for the cheaper ones, all made in a single online reservation through the convenience of Pay Your Way.

But as you’ve gleaned by now, it doesn’t work. You can’t apply a Suite Upgrade Award to a Pay Your Way reservation online, but Hyatt can’t apply it over the phone either.

How much of a problem this is depends on which nights you intended to apply the free night award to. Hyatt is better, in my experience, at detecting and combining reservations in advance, so if you’re using the free night award for your last night, you can just use the Suite Upgrade Award for the first nights of the reservation (booked with cash or points) and you’ll have a chance verging on 100% of simply being left in the same suite for the last, “ineligible” night.

This is less likely to work if the night you want to use the free night award on falls in the middle of your stay, but I suspect the odds are still pretty good.

I hesitate to venture a guess on how the billing would work out if you tried this with a Guest of Honor award, since many of those benefits are literally billed daily or nightly: breakfast, valet parking, resort fees.

Conclusion

World of Hyatt has been in a class by themselves when it comes to resisting the devaluation of their points and free night awards, and I am going to rely on them more in 2025 since I qualified for Globalist in 2024 for the first time since taking advantage of the Starwood-Marriott status match years ago.

But I’m not here to give them any more credit than they deserve: the system is still pretty annoying and I hope this post makes it slightly less annoying for the next guy.