Is Hyatt Withholding Award Inventory at One of its Best Properties?

The Park Hyatt New York is one of the more anticipated luxury hotel openings of the year. It has 210 guest rooms and is accepting reservations for August 12 and beyond.

But is it ever possible to redeem points for a room here? Is Hyatt playing games?

The entry level room there is the ‘Park King’ (standard nomenclature for a Park Hyatt). Entry level rooms are generally what you redeem for when claiming free night awards with points.

Natural stone flooring with residential area rug and museum-quality artwork create a lavish yet home-like feel in this 484- to 623-sq.-ft. guestroom that features one king bed topped in fine Italian linens and city views through floor-to-ceiling windows. A walk-in rain shower, signature Le Labo products and luxurious soaking tub await in the five-fixture bath, while modern amenities include wireless Internet and integrated media hub.

Only there never seem to be any Park King rooms available for sale, which means there aren’t award rooms available either.

The lowest category room I’ve been able to find available is the Park Deluxe King. This room often goes for $750 to over $1000 a night.

They do have standard rooms at the hotel. I inquired and Hyatt told me,

Park Hyatt New York will offer 26 standard rooms

Only 26 rooms. Out of 210. They call 12.4% of rooms standard.

Here’s the first definition of ‘standard’ as an adjective from Google:

I think it’s the most common room. Hotels think standard means the base, lowest-level room. The Intercontinental Thalasso on Bora Bora used to have a single room, that they didn’t even offer for sale, that was their entry level room and thus their award room. That made getting awards difficult. They’ve since changed that policy.

Still, a major city hotel with over 200 rooms calling only 12% of those rooms award eligible? Incredibly cheeky. And that’s if they even load inventory for those rooms.

It does not appear that making only a handful of rooms available on points is an actual violation of the Hyatt Gold Passport terms and conditions, however. Those terms and conditions say

Hyatt Gold Passport Free Night Awards apply when standard rooms are available at the Hyatt Daily Rate. Standard rooms are defined by each hotel and are not subject to blackout dates.

(Emphasis mine.)

Clearly this is something being done at the hotel level. But it doesn’t pass the smell these if they are:

  • Failing to load inventory for the room type one can claim with points.
  • Assigning such a negligible subset of rooms to that category.

No doubt this is a pricey hotel, and they may not like to allow guests to redeem points when the hotel isn’t booked solid (because their reimbursement rates are low).

On the other hand, Hyatt introduced a new category 7 this year precisely for expensive hotels like this one, and a redemption here costs a whopping 30,000 points a night just like the Park Hyatts in Paris and Sydney. At that price, and with Hyatt’s promise of no capacity controls on award rooms, it should be possible to redeem points for a room here. But currently it appears that it is not. The hotel appears to simply not load any inventory for the handful of rooms of type designated for awards.

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The post Is Hyatt Withholding Award Inventory at One of its Best Properties? appeared first on View from the Wing.


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