Update 12/26/24: A few days ago, we received an e-mail from a reader who said that they had successfully applied a suite upgrade award for an available standard suite when there wasn’t any regular standard room availability. They were later contacted by Hyatt and told that they shouldn’t have been able to do that in the first place, so the reservation would be cancelled (although they were given the option to pay $600/night to book directly into the suite).
We assumed that this incident was just a hiccup with one property, but it appears that Hyatt really never meant to make it possible in the first place. Over the last couple of days, we haven’t been able to find any properties where we can apply a suite upgrade to to an available standard suite online when there is no standard room available. My Hyatt concierge told me that it was an accidental IT glitch and now even reps who previously knew how to get around it weren’t able to. At least for now, this appears to be dead.
Bah humbug.
~~~
Last week, we wrote a post covering the new ability to self-apply Hyatt Suite Upgrade Awards (SUA) and Club Access Awards online without having to call or message a rep to manually apply them.
I might have buried the lede a bit, however. One of our favorite parts about this change is that there no longer needs to be standard room availability in order to apply a SUA online. As long as there’s a standard suite available, you can now book directly into it. Previously, this was only possible only with some reps who knew what they were doing, making it complete pain to get it done. (h/t: MilesTalk, Frequent Miler Insiders)
How to apply Hyatt Suite Upgrade Awards online
We put this in the original post about the changes, but heard that multiple folks were still unaware, so figured a separate post about it was warranted.
How to apply Hyatt Suite Upgrade Awards online
Guest of Honor, Club Access and Suite Upgrade awards can now all be added as a part of the normal booking process.
On the website, there is a menu at the top of the search results screen that allows you to apply existing awards to the room results listed beneath. You simply choose what you want to use and finish the booking.
When booking through the app, there is a dropdown menu called “Available Awards.”
By expanding this menu, you can see all the awards that are currently live in your account:
Once you select an award, it will automatically be applied to the room and rate that you choose. When you’re choosing to use a Suite Upgrade Award, the display will change to show you the new rate for a suite with the award applied:
Indeed the best part of this change might be that you can now book an available suite directly, even if there is no standard award availability. In the past, most reps wouldn’t let you use a suite upgrade unless there was a standard room available to book first. Now, a standard suite will be available during booking even if there’s no standard room available…and you can easily book itself. That’s a marvelous upgrade to the utility of Suite Upgrade Awards.
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