Hyatt Website Quirk Globalist Guaranteed Availability
Hyatt has long been known for their underwhelming IT. Over the years we have seen a number of interesting issues with their site including costs being wrong, hotels booking for no points, etc. Today I found yet another quirk that probably won’t affect most of you but is interesting nonetheless.
A Disneyland Oddity
Next month I am visiting Disneyland with my family during a time when a large convention is also in town. This has driven hotel prices up with most properties now sold out. For example, the Hyatt Place in Anaheim was sold out, but recently just released a single room at the following price.
Yikes that is a lot of money! Thankfully this is a standard room which means I can book with points. Instead of paying $640 per night (plus parking & taxes making it over $700), I only will pay this.
Cheaper When Sold Out?
Not bad, but what if I was paying cash? Well, not unexpectedly the room above was the last available hotel room for those dates. Once I booked it the hotel once again became sold out. When I search for the hotel while not logged in, here is what shows.
But as a Globalist you are entitled to the following benefit:
- Ensure a room is available at participating Hyatt hotels up to 48 hours in advance (blackout dates apply)
This means that most properties will allow Globalists to book a room even if they are sold out or mostly sold out. The catch is the price is generally astronomically high. Basically this is a perk meant for business travelers who need a room last minute and want to stay at Hyatt. In this case though it produces an interesting result. Now that the hotel is sold out, look at what my guaranteed room rate is.
Yes, it is a slightly different room, but both are base rooms which cost 12,000 points per night when there is availability. Note that guaranteed rooms cannot be booked with points, so this is a cash only rate and one that is $111 cheaper than the cash rate when the hotel wasn’t sold out!
So What Happened?
I searched some other dates and it seems that this hotel (and most likely others) has a set astronomical guaranteed rate of $529. My guess is this number varies by hotel, but is probably the same across dates for the same property. Anyway, in this case the hotel raised their last room price above this guaranteed price resulting in this situation. When I booked that final room, this benefit kicked in.
Conclusion
I’m not sure if this is a revelation or just an interesting tidbit of information, but it’s always nice to know more right? I guess if you book last minute rooms at expensive hotels this could come in handy. The bottom line is that sometimes sold out hotels are cheaper than almost sold out hotels for Globalists. It sort of doesn’t make sense but then again it sort of does.
Have you ever seen this phenomenon at another Hyatt property? Tell us in the comments!
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Yeah, you’ve just hit a one-in-a-million where the last room became available at an even higher price than the guaranteed rate. It shows how abnormal that $640 rate is. It only happened because that hotel is next door to the convention center.
I had a different quirk this morning. I went to book a Hyatt for a Thur-Sun next month. The rate was $274/night for 3 nights, $825 total. If I changed the reservation to Thurs-Mon, the the rate was $190/night, $760 total. I’ve seen hotels give away that Sun. night for almost free, but paying me $65 to stay over Sunday? Guess which one I booked? 😉
Hilton does that too for Diamonds