Here’s an exciting and long overdue development, if you ask me…
Hyatt’s new award availability calendar feature
World of Hyatt has just rolled out an awesome new award availability calendar feature, whereby you can search award availability at a particular hotel for an entire year in just seconds. This is available through both the Hyatt website and the World of Hyatt mobile app.
For context, up until now, Hyatt has had a points calendar, but that only showed you the pricing for a particular night based on peak or off-peak pricing, and didn’t actually tell you if any award rooms were available, so it was of limited use.
So, what all has changed? For one, if you search for points availability at a hotel, the initial search page will show you both the cash and points price, and if there’s not points availability for that night, it’ll say “Points rates unavailable for selected dates.”
If you click “VIEW RATES,” you’ll then brought to a page that lets you go to the points calendar.
Below is what the points calendar looks like. As you can see, it’s super easy to use, and you can see both pricing and availability with ease.
If you want to see the calendar while searching for availability, just click on the “Points Calendar” prompt near the top of the page, and that will take you to the calendar.
Lastly, if a member has a destination in mind and wants to see what hotels have award availability, the map feature now shows the lowest points rate, if available, or the cash rate, if award nights are not available for a stay.
I’m happy to see World of Hyatt introduce this!
I’m delighted to see World of Hyatt offering a proper award availability calendar, as this was missing for all too long. It’s something that both Hilton Honors and Marriott Bonvoy have had for a long time, and IHG One Rewards has a “secret” calendar like this as well.
I found that the old calendar that Hyatt had almost caused more confusion than anything, since people would see a points price, and then be disappointed that there was no award availability (since it just showed the theoretical pricing, rather than actual availability).
Over the years, we’ve seen all kinds of tools pop up to help people find award availability. That’s largely because of the lack of transparency programs have offered in that area, either due to bad IT, or by design. The more that programs empower members to redeem their points, the better.
Bottom line
World of Hyatt has finally rolled out an award availability calendar, letting members search points availability and pricing across months at a time with ease. This is so much more useful than Hyatt’s old points calendar, so I’m pleased to see this change.
What do you make of World of Hyatt’s new award availability feature?
