When the World of Hyatt Credit Card launched a few months ago, one of the awesome new perks is a free Category 1-4 free night after $15K spend per cardmember year. That’s in addition to the annual free night at anniversary and the points earned on your spend (which would be at least enough for a third night at a Category 4 hotel since they charge 15K points per night). At the Chicago Seminars this past weekend, someone suggested a post about the best places to use a Hyatt Category 1-4 certificate within the US. Here it is.
Of course, “the best” place to use a free night certificate is a place where you need to stay on a night when you need a room. That is to say that saving your certificate with the hopes to use it at a place on a “best of” certificate is not as good a use for it as when you have an opportunity to save real cash on a night you need.
That said, in an effort to answer the question as to best places to use the certificates, I created a spreadsheet to do some comparison. For the purposes of the post, I am only comparing Category 4 Hyatts since these would be the top use of a certificate in terms of getting maximum point value.
In order to compare the 43 Category 4 Hyatt properties within the US, I decided to search room rates for three random dates: December 15 (a Saturday during winter), April 9th (a random Tuesday in Spring), and June 15th (a Saturday during summer). In cases where a hotel was not available on one of these days, I picked another similar day as best I could. Note that I compared to the best flexible rate since points are generally flexible. Prepaid rates are of course lower.
I then averaged the rate between those three data points for each hotel. While far from a perfect measurement, this gave me some sort of idea as to a general relative value. Here are the top 10 Category 4 Hyatt properties in the US in terms of cash rates spread across a date in winter, spring, and summer.
Hotel |
December 15 |
April 9 |
June 15 |
Average |
134 | 411 | 316 | 287 | |
220 | 252 | 414 | 295.3333333 | |
284 | 329 | 309 | 307.3333333 | |
289 | 329 | 329 | 315.6666667 | |
228 | 380 | 351 | 319.6666667 | |
144 | 541 | 275 | 320 | |
239 | 470 | 276 | 328.3333333 | |
174 | 424 | 394 | 330.6666667 | |
166 | 490 | 490 | 382 | |
401 | 662 | 245 | 436 |
Of course, you should also consider the list as it matches up to your travel plans and keep in mind that I used three isolated dates.
Despite somewhat lower room rates, I thought a couple of other places were worth an honorable mention: Hyatt Regency Chicago, Andaz Savannah, and Hyatt at Olive 8 in Seattle all seemed worth a mention as room rates in those cities can sometimes be quite high.
Bottom line
These are the most expensive Category 4 Hyatt hotels over a random three dates over the next year. Does that make them the “best” hotels? Hardly. But it may make them some of the best values for Category 1-4 free night certificates.
What is your favorite Cat 1-4 Hyatt in the United States?