My
girlfriend and I were looking to stay in downtown Chicago in a few weeks but
due to an event happening there, most of the hotels are either full or only
have pricey rooms available. This left me in quite a predicament as I don’t
like to use our precious Sapphire points to book hotels, but it appeared this
was our only option. I had pretty much resigned myself to spending 80,000+
points for two nights downtown, until I happened upon this little gem of an
award chart I’d never really considered before:
This award
chart belongs to Hyatt. I’ve never stayed at a Hyatt because wherever they are
there have always been Hiltons and Starwoods, two chains I’m loyal to. In this
case though, I didn’t have enough Hilton points for their downtown hotels, and
the only Starwood available was the brand new Aloft, which was just a bit too
far towards downtown for us.
Enter the
Hyatt Magnificent Mile, a 4-star hotel that normally costs $400 a night. It
comes in on the award chart as a category 4, and there were award nights
available. So instead of 80,000 Ultimate Rewards points, I ended up
transferring 30,000 to Hyatt and booking that way. That was the lowest point
cost for any hotel I saw downtown, by far.
It turns out
3 of their 4 downtown Chicago hotels cost 15,000 per night. That’s pretty darn
cheap. So cheap, in fact, that I looked into their credit card.
Chase Hyatt Credit Card
Boy was I
impressed! This card earns you two free nights at any Hyatt property worldwide after $1,000 spend. Two nights at the
Park Hyatt Maldives would cost you $1,500 by comparison. That is one lucrative
signup bonus! Plus you get their Platinum elite status just for having the
card, and you earn 1 point per dollar on all spend. Given that the Chase
Sapphire Preferred also earns 1 point per dollar and you can transfer points
1:1 to Hyatt, it doesn’t really make sense to spend on the card. But it’s
definitely worth signing up for the bonus alone.
I’m very
excited to start using this program more. Well done Hyatt!
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