Basic Steps to Book a Free Hotel Night using Credit Card Points
A great option for using your credit card points is to book hotel nights with them. The process of booking a hotel night using points is similar to booking a normal stay using cash. When searching on the hotel programs website, there is usually a check box for award bookings when you enter your search criteria. Let's walkthrough an example using Hyatt, one of the best hotel options for maximizing your credit card points. Keep in mind you can follow these steps for other hotel chains as well.
The first thing you should do is sign-up for a World of Hyatt account through the Hyatt website. In order to book a hotel night using points you will need to have a member account setup with the hotel program. It's free to join and comes with the following benefits.
Next, if you don't already have points with the hotel, you need to think about which credit card points will transfer to the hotel program. In this case, since we're looking at Hyatt, we know that we can transfer Chase points to Hyatt from the credit card transfer partners listed here.
To transfer your Chase points to Hyatt, you need to make sure your Hyatt account is linked using the Chase Ultimate Rewards website and looking for Transfer to Travel Partners. You will be able to transfer 1:1 in 1,000 point increments to Hyatt. The transfer is instantaneous per our Points Transfer Time post here.
Hyatt categorizes each of their hotels from 1 to 8. Other hotel programs will either have a redemption table like Hyatt or use dynamic pricing for their redemptions. The redemption rate for a standard room for each Hyatt category is as follows.
Now let's try to book an award night in London at the Hyatt Regency London-The Churchill. From here it's like a normal hotel search. The only thing you have to do is make sure the use points box is checked.
One other thing to mention when doing an award search for Hyatt is that they also have a calendar view that shows how many points are required during each day of the month. This is helpful to quickly check the redemption rate for days you may be interested in.
Hyatt also implements pricing based on peak and off-peak, so for any given day they may require more or less than the standard redemption rate for the category. In this example, you can see that there are a few days priced at 29,000 per night instead of the standard 25,000.
On the day of our example, there are award nights available. You can book a one night stay for 25,000 Hyatt points since this is a Category 6 property.
Not a bad deal when you compare it to the cash rates for the same night. At the time of this post, 529 GBP is about 670 USD. So the per point value of this redemption is about $0.027 ($670/25,000 points), which is a good value for your Chase points. If you booked this hotel night on the Chase Travel portal you would only be able to redeem your Chase points for between 1 to 1.5 cents depending on which credit card you have as we discussed here.
With Hyatt, they will not charge you for anything additional on award nights. In this example, the 25,000 points is all you would pay for this free night with no additional cash outlay. Some hotel programs may make you pay a resort fee on award stays, so just be aware of that during your searches. Hyatt and Hilton do not charge resort fees on award stays.
Now imagine if you earned a Chase sign-up bonus of 75,000 points from opening a new credit card, that would be enough for a 3 night stay at this hotel with a cash value of approximately $2,010! Or you could use the sign-up bonus at a lower category hotel somewhere else for more free nights!
There are so many possibilities. I hope this post helps you book some free nights on your next trip and illustrates the value that you can get by transferring your credit card points to hotel programs.
