Keep in mind that the PH Chicago is also a fairly small property - so there are probably only a limited number of rooms (my guess is maybe 5 - just from my own feeling) that are available for any award redemption each night. Hyatt's program dictate that a certain number of rooms are made available every single night for award redemption and once they're taken, they're gone (unless someone cancels). However, the property has the right to open up more rooms for awards which is probably why some have been successful at getting award rooms even though they're shown as not available.

I'm not sure how I feel about having different buckets for FFN and regular awards since our Hyatt "oldtimers" here usually pre-book our desired awards using our point stash and then converting to FFN once earned (although many of us have had some difficulty doing so with untrained agents).

However, I do feel strongly that people should not be allowed to book "unlimited" FFN awards like they were able to this time without having points or already earned FFNs to back them up. I don't have a problem with people being to book a "limited" number of FFN awards (perhaps 5 nights or so) with no "backup" required. This way people can't "hoard" award nights with little likelihood that they could ever use them.