Turning One Hyatt Free Night Certificate Into Two Free Nights With An Award Transfer

Hyatt Award Transfer

I was recently able to use a Hyatt award transfer to turn my wife’s free night certificate into a two night stay elsewhere for me. We have used this underrated World of Hyatt program perk for a few years now, but I realized I have never written about it on the site. We also discussed this a bit on this week’s podcast episode.

What Is A Hyatt Award Transfer

If you have a two player system (significant other etc. that plays the miles and points game with you), enjoy the World of Hyatt program and have never heard of a Hyatt award transfer then you are in for a treat. Especially if you have Hyatt status.

When a spouse or significant other earns a certificate with a hotel loyalty program it can be a bit cumbersome at times. Sure, you can usually use the certificate to book a hotel room for yourself, even when they are not traveling with you, or at least that works most of the time. What if you have status or are chasing status though? Using their certificate won’t earn you elite night credits and you won’t be able to use your status perks during your stay. No free breakfast you say!? The horror!

With a Hyatt award transfer you get to have your cake and eat it to. The person can essentially transfer the certificate to your account so you can use it as if it is your own.

How To Transfer A Hyatt Free Night Certificate

You are probably thinking that this sounds amazing, but how is it done? The person with the certificate, can be virtually anyone as far as I know and doesn’t have to be in your household etc., needs to call into World of Hyatt and make the booking for you. They will need the following for the call:

• Their account info
• Your account info
• Your email address
• The hotel booking date and info

Once they get on the phone with a rep they will say they would like to make a Hyatt award transfer booking. In my experience around half of the agents know what this is. If the rep doesn’t seem to grasp the term have the person calling say they would like to use their free night for your account to take advantage of your status etc. If you still don’t get anywhere, hang up and call back to get another agent.

Once you get someone who knows what is going on the caller will feed them all of the details. Make sure they give the rep your World of Hyatt number so it gets properly attached to your account. They will need your email info as well so you can get the confirmation sent to you. Once it is all set you should see the booking in your Hyatt account as if you had booked it directly yourself.

There was one time it didn’t show up in my account, but I did get the email confirmation. I reached out to the Hyatt Twitter team and they were able to add my member number (the phone agent forgot) and then it was in my account.

How I Recently Used This Perk To Maximize Our Stays

We just used this World of Hyatt program perk for our trip to Chicago. I was running into an issue when World of Hyatt points were taking forever to transfer from my wife’s account to my account. I didn’t want to do another Ultimate Rewards to Hyatt transfer since we had the points needed with Hyatt already, we just needed them in the right account. The problem was that I had an upcoming trip I needed to book a hotel for and I was out of options.

I had booked our Chicago trip at the Thompson, a category 4 hotel. It was pricing as a peak award (18K a night) and I only had 1 free night certificate on my account to use at the the time of booking. So I booked the first night with my last free night certificate and booked the second night with the last 18,000 points I had in my account. A few weeks later a free night certificate posted to my wife’s account for finishing the $15,000 in spend on her World of Hyatt card.

Luckily, the room I needed to book for a future trip was a category 2 hotel and pricing at 8,000 points a night. That gave me a chance to pull a rope a dope with our bookings. If I had my wife make a Hyatt award transfer booking for the Thompson then I could cancel my reservation and get back the 18,000 points I had used. I could then use those points to book the two nights I needed at the category 2 hotel and still have a few thousand points left over. This award transfer was essentially turning our one free night cert into two nights at another hotel. #winning

Hyatt Award Transfer: Final Thoughts

The award transfer is kind of like a Guest of Honor booking but in reverse. This is a must use option if you have status, are chasing status or just want to hit another brand explorer perk brand. I love that the transfer option isn’t limited. It could be a way to split the hotel bookings for a friends trip and still maximize the value between you by focusing on the account with status. For example, booking our free night this way allowed us to use my wife’s certificate from an account with no status but still get free breakfast, free valet parking and late checkout because of my Globalist status.

This makes Hyatt free night certificates even more valuable in a two player system. Hopefully this comes in handy for you in the future.

Disclosure: Miles to Memories has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Miles to Memories and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers.

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