Hyatt Points Calendar – What Is This Cool New Feature?
The Hyatt Points Calendar is a new feature on the website. What is it? Should we care? The fact I’m writing this should tell you that it’s worth caring about, so let’s look at what it is. I think you’ll find this new tool on Hyatt’s website pretty useful.
Hyatt Points Calendar
Now that Hyatt has officially introduced peak and off-peak pricing, we knew changes would be coming. The first of these seems to be the Hyatt Points Calendar, which can show you a calendar of dates, one month at a time. Here’s a look at it in practice, so we can see what it does.
Let’s imagine we want to go to Miami.
We head to Hyatt.com and search for “Miami” with some dates in mind. You get a ton of hotel options and some indications of what a night might cost in cash or points.
I chose the Hyatt Centric South Beach Miami, since I know nothing about this hotel. Once I choose a specific hotel, under the address and phone number there’s now a “points calendar” option.
From the Points Calendar option on Hyatt’s website, I can view a month at a time. I will see the price per night in number of points required. This way, you can browse for peak/off-peak dates. You could save some points if you are flexible for your dates.
Conversely, you could see that the place you chose is too expensive and look at another hotel to save your points stash.
Key Notes
A few key things to notice:
- You can view the Points Calendar even if you aren’t logged into your account.
- You cannot view the points calendar “in general” for an area–you must choose a specific hotel. Thus, you’ll have to look at one and then look at another if you want to compare them.
- The drop-down menu where the name of the month is located is a bit wonky. Using the forward and backward arrows is much simpler.
- It doesn’t guarantee award space availability though. The calendar just shows what the price would be. Hopefully that is added / updated in the future.
Final Thoughts
Now that we’re moving into dynamic pricing with World of Hyatt, the Points Calendar seems like it could be useful. That’s for folks with flexibility, obviously. If there’s only one Hyatt hotel in town, and if your dates are fixed, then you might be stuck–no matter the peak pricing in place. Personally, I think it’s good to have a tool to search for flexible dates and see award pricing a month at a time.
Let us know what you think about this new tool.
HT: Travel on Points
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Calling Hyatt’s implementation of peak and off-peak “dynamic” is a bit of a misnomer. Once the rates are set over year in advance for a market, they are fixed and won’t change if demand changes. This is still better than most other hotel loyalty programs.
True but that is where it starts usually and it is a devaluation of the program overall imo. At least that is how it has worked everywhere else. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them go dynamic in a few years.
Point increases and moves to variable pricing are never cool – they reduce the value of the award system and take away opportunities to extract value. The ultimate fail is the Marriott program, where everything is priced on a cash basis and your points are merely funny money which have a set conversion value.