World of Hyatt now lets you book suites online with points

An exciting development came out of Hyatt Hotel's World of Hyatt program late last week whereby they now allow you use your points to book suites online. Prior to this you would have to call World of Hyatt to book them and with so much of everything in the world these days being online this is nice option to have with the program. This is especially so thanks to the value the World of Hyatt program provides for it's suites!

Here's what Hyatt told us about this new development:

Technology is helping us better care for our members – by introducing this capability across Hyatt’s digital channels, we can elevate the booking process and put members in control as they plan their leisure travel when they feel ready to explore.

As a reminder these are the points required for a free night across the board at most Hyatt Hotels:

You'll see that you can redeem as little as 8,000 points to get into Standard Suites and 10,000 points for a premium suite per night. On the top end you are looking at 48,000 points and 60,000 points respectively.  Points requirements do go higher if you want to redeem at Miraval Resorts while Hyatt Ziva resorts range from 32,000 to 40,000 points per night.

To see how it works I decided to check out the Hyatt Regency Calgary as I saw last night on Twitter  that they are finally reopening this Friday. So how about a suite for that opening night?

The conference suite can be booked for 20,000 World of Hyatt points for the night versus an all in cash rate of $616. This gives you a value of nearly 3.1 cents (C$) per point. That's pretty good but there are options out there around the world that give even better value of well 5 to 10 cents per point (C$). For example one of the locations making the rounds on the blogs right now is the Ventana Big Sur an Alila Resort.

Here's one night in September:

The Big Sur Suite is available for 48,000 points or a cash price of US$2,250.55. That's almost 4.7 cents US per points or around 6.3 cents per points in C$. But you have to remember as well that right now Hyatt is offering a 15% World of Hyatt points rebate when you redeem for award nights or points+cash stays until October 8. Technically speaking you can then discount those points rates above by 15% and create more value out of each point.