Anytime you book a hotel stay for free it’s awesome. But, it’s incredibly awesome when it’s a hard-to-book room previously unavailable on points. This happened with my recent booking of a $1,000+ per night stay in Tokyo on my 5-day trip to Kyoto and Tokyo.
The background
My research of Tokyo hotels led me to a shortlist of top hotels bookable with points and miles. A few of these were Hyatts. But one was extra special according to most reviews, the Andaz Tokyo (Hyatt).
I really wanted to stay at the Andaz because every review and blog post across the interwebs told me that this was a fantastic hotel and that the other good Hyatt options, the Park Hyatt Tokyo or Grand Hyatt Tokyo, were past their prime. The Andaz is the new “it” hotel.
However, the hotel was sold out. It wasn’t available with points. If you’ve ever searched for a Hyatt at a popular destination, you know this screen all too well.
I know Hyatt usually has favorable cancellation policies. (You can always read the policy before booking to know exactly what your cancellation policy will be.) With Hyatt, I generally book and decide later. I can always cancel for free before the deadline, and get all my points back. To make it an even easier decision, canceling can be done in about 30 seconds from my phone or computer, so that’s not a hassle either.
So, I grabbed 2 nights at the Grand Hyatt because it was available. While it was my backup plan, it was still an awesome option if the Andaz continued to be sold out.
But, how would I deal with the FOMO of having my one visit to Tokyo and not staying at the hotel that’s currently all the rage?!
This is where Open Hotel Alert comes in handy.
A free tool for free hotels
One thing I don’t like doing is spending extra mental energy on tasks. That’s basically why I created Travel Freely in the first place. As a full-time teacher, I needed a way to put the stressors of rewards credit card management on autopilot.
Open Hotel Alert does something simple but magical when it comes to booking hard-to-find award hotel stays. It puts the tracking on autopilot. And like Travel Freely, Open Hotel Alert is free and easy-to-use.
The main reason I have used Open Hotel Alert so far is to find Hyatt hotels when they are unavailable with points. Whether you have a trip in the near future or a long way away, this tool can help you immensely. Imagine if you sat at your computer and kept refreshing the availability for a hotel stay on Hyatt’s website for days without end. This tool does that for you and sends you a text or email when it has the good news that a room is available. =)
Like most technology, there’s a one-time learning curve. But getting past this will save tons of time and lead to epic free hotels!
My example
I’m going to walk you through how I set an alert for the Andaz Tokyo to give you an understanding of how it works so you can benefit when you come across an awesome Hyatt hotel that’s currently unavailable with points.
There are just a few steps to get you up and running. First, you search for availability just like you would on any hotel search. You put in the dates and the name of the exact hotel you want to search, and it will show you availability per room type for those dates. This is key because while it doesn’t identify award stay availability exactly, it allows you to monitor the room types that are in fact the award rooms.
When you get the results, the only thing you need to do is to find out what the base standard rooms are for the hotel. These will be the ones that are bookable with points. The tool won’t tell you, but a little bit of logic goes a long way to making this a magical Hyatt tool.
Just find the lowest rate standard room(s) and use those to set the alerts.
For example, here is what the Grand Hyatt Tokyo showed as bookable with points on Hyatt’s site:
On Open Hotel Alert, you can see these 3 room types as available, which matches the availability on Hyatt’s website.
Next, here’s what I saw when searching Hyatt’s site for the Andaz Tokyo:
Knowing I could set an alert, I looked up the Andaz Tokyo on Open Hotel Alert and found the standard rooms to set up an alert, the King Room and Twin Room.
How do I know those are the standard rooms? Well, they are the most basic room types. It looks overwhelming and complicated to figure this out at first, but it’s pretty simple. Basically, you want to look for any room type that does not have the word “Suite,” “View”, or “Deluxe” in it! After doing that, I was left with King Room and Twin Room. These are the room types used for standard award nights.
Quick Note: For those with lots of points and wanting more space, I know what you’re thinking. Yes, you can also use this tool and similar logic if you are after standard suite awards, too.
On the results screen, I pushed the Alert Me button on King Room and then it allowed me to add the Twin Room as another option for the same alert.
Keep in mind that you do have to sign up for an account, but it’s free.
About 4 days later, and just a few days from the start of my trip, I got an email from Open Hotel Alert! I clicked into the email and saw there was availability for a King Room! #boomshakalaka
My heart started pounding – this is the kind of adrenaline that points and miles enthusiasts have come to be addicted to. I thought to myself, “Am I really going to be able to book this hotel?” And that adrenaline that all free travelers feel, “Am I really going to Tokyo and staying at this incredible hotel for free?” Images of the lobby, spa, breakfast, etc., all rolled through my mind as the excitement kicked in.
I raced to Hyatt’s site and there it was, like magic, seeing a room available to book with points after days of seeing the brutal message, “Unfortunately, this hotel is not accepting World of Hyatt points during those dates.” Now it was available and I could book it! I crossed my fingers for very fast internet to get my booking confirmed. I got the room!
This trick took my trip from awesome to incredibly awesome. It was basically a travel hack within a travel hack because it found the room I wanted to book with points without having to refresh the Hyatt website every 10 minutes on my own.
The idea of staying in this hotel had become a bit of an obsession in my mind, and the ability to stay there was a points and miles dream come true. Before I got too excited, I made sure to cancel my Grand Hyatt reservation knowing that I had locked in my Andaz stay. Once that was done, I was pumped. The best hotel on points in Tokyo was mine.
In conclusion
Needless to say, I recommend checking out this free tool whenever you get the dreaded “unavailable with points” when searching availability on Hyatt’s site. Let Open Hotel Alert hit refresh a million times while you go about your day.
Before a final thought, here are a few glam shots of the Andaz Tokyo…
Final thoughts
I think this tactic is really helpful with popular hotels in popular cities. Because cancellation policies are generous, I imagine that a lot of reservations are made on speculation. Then, cancellations happen in the days leading up to the check-in date. People may have multiple reservations and then decide to go with one. Or, there may be a lot of business travelers who don’t end up needing the rooms. So it makes sense that availability would open up just days before the dates you need. This was my experience as the Andaz opened up just before I went on my trip.
Bonus
Open Hotel Alert is a great tool to use when your travel dates are fixed and you know which room types are considered standard rooms (or standard suites) for awards. You can set it and forget it until you get the alert.
The downside is that Open Hotel Alert does not allow for flexible alerts for when your dates can be flexible vs. fixed. There are other fancy hotel award booking tools out there with varying pros and cons and costs. IMO, these tools are too advanced for a beginner to jump in and use successfully without getting through a learning curve and accepting the limitations. The easiest option is to go to the hotel’s site to search for the dates you want! If you’re interested, check out Frequent Miler’s article for a comparison of 2 of these tools.
