Travel rewards 101: #8 How to Redeem Points for Hotel Stays

  In this post, I’ll outline how to use your points and miles to book hotels at great values. Note that this will be from the perspective of using transferable points to book hotels, as it’s much more straightforward to do this if you’ve earned hotel points directly, say by opening a World of Hyatt, Marriott Bonvoy, or Hilton Honors credit card. If you have one of those points currencies already, you can follow the same steps outlined here, but you won’t need to transfer your points in the first place. 

Step 1: Sign Up for an Account with the Hotel Partner

Step 2: Search for availability with the Hotel Partner

Hilton’s website has the nice functionality that you can search for multiple days at the same time. This is also possible with Marriott and IHG, but not on World of Hyatt’s website directly unfortunately. As a starting point, I typically like to search for dates flexibly, unless I have extremely fixed dates that I need and can’t afford to move my trip at all. This gives me the ability to see whether the hotel I’m looking for has availability at all around the time I’d like. 

Hilton then takes me to a page where it lays out all the properties available in the area I searched (Maui in this case), and I decide that the Grand Wailea, a Waldorf-Astoria property, looks great.

I can then search for specific dates by choosing this hotel and I see based on the screenshot below that there is wide open standard room award availability (this is what we should be looking for) at the Grand Wailea for the next month at 110,000 Hilton Honors points per night. 

When I restart my search for September 12-16 specifically, I’m in luck and find that the availability is indeed there for my four night stay. Great! Assuming I have enough Hilton Honors points to book the stay, I can go ahead and do that at this point. If I were buying points or transferring in from American Express, I can do that at this point if I feel comfortable with locking in these dates as well. 

Step 3: Understand Whether this is a Good Value Redemption

As we walked through in Post #7: How to Redeem Transferable Points, we want to keep a couple things in mind to understand whether this is a good value redemption. 

 

1. Compare the points cost against the cash cost of the stay to determine how much your points are buying you. 

 

In this case, I see that I can book the same Terrace View – 1 King Bed room for $3,847.73 including taxes. Outside of the Travel Rewards 101 series, I’ll explain that we should also factor in the points we earn from the cash stay in our overall value here, but as a quick guide, I can see that I can use 440,000 Hilton Honors points for this 4 night stay, which would otherwise cost me $3,847.73. This means my Hilton Honors points are worth ~0.87CPP in this scenario. This is a pretty good value for a Hilton Honors redemption. In a future post, I’ll walk through how we should consider what we can buy a program’s points for in determining whether we should transfer points, but at the very least, we know that we’re getting more value with this redemption than we could buy the points for: if we were starting from scratch, I could buy 440,000 points for $2,200 at a 0.5CPP value, so I wouldn’t be losing any value by buying the points compared to the cash cost of the stay. 

 

2. Compare the redemption value against other uses of transferable points

 

I won’t delve into the details of why this may or may not be a good redemption by transferring American Express points to Hilton in this post, as it’s a bit more of an advanced topic, but at the very least, it’s a good redemption for Hilton Honors points. I should at the very least consider whether I can get more value by cashing out and buying points (in this case, no) or by using the American Express portal (also no in this case), so as a baseline, I might transfer my American Express points to Hilton because I’ve cleared both of these checks. 

Step 4: Transfer / Buy Points as Needed

Now that I’ve found award availability, if I’m comfortable with locking in the dates I found, I can transfer or buy Hilton Honors points to complete the purchase. Always keep in mind what the hotel cancellation policy is for points bookings. This varies by hotel. I can see that for the Grand Wailea in this case, I have until August 29 (14 days prior to the stay) to cancel. This is actually slightly less friendly than usual: most hotels’ cancellation policies typically allow you to cancel bookings up until 1-2 days before the stay. 

This is also another reason that points can allow you to be more flexible than you otherwise may be: typically, the best advertised cash rate is not flexible, and often it’s not refundable at all. I typically like to have some level of flexibility whenever I’m booking, because plans may change over time. It’s important to keep this in mind when booking! 

A Note on Searching for Hyatt Stays:

I walked through this example with Hilton, because Hilton has the nice capability on their site of searching flexibly. This is also true for Marriott and IHG, and I would follow similar strategies for looking into award availability with them. World of Hyatt is unfortunately a lot less flexible: they do not have an award availability calendar that you can browse to easily see whether the hotel you want has availability over the period you’d like. To search with Hyatt specifically, you will unfortunately have to search for your specific dates, find the property you’re interested in, and see whether there is World of Hyatt award availability, such as in the screenshot below. 

It’s also worth knowing that there are now a handful of tools, third party sites, that help to search for broader hotel award availability and can send you alerts for specific hotels that may be highly prized and not very available. Know that these exist, but I’ll provide an overview of this path of searching for hotel availability outside of the Travel Rewards 101 series.