Originally Posted by
hindukid
In all those examples the hotel or airline is not pretending to have an award in existence. Four seasons may not get rid of empty rooms with awards but they don't pretend that such awards exist. I wouldn't have any issue if Hyatt stated at the beginning that awards are not valid at PH properties.
Is there any airline or hotel program that has an award for a seat/room and will deny availability and choose to let the seat go empty. AFAIK many will deny availability until the very last minute in an attempt to sell for revenue, but who denies award availability at the last minute and chooses to let the seat/room go empty.
MANY air and hotel programs do this. QF for example is notorious for not opening C/F award availability even 1 day before departure despite lots of empty seats. I think a lot of other non-US carriers also do this, but I don't have first hand experience with them. Granted, most of the US airlines either do tend to open up award space at the last minute, or let you upgrade in a standby fashion (if you've already redeemed a premium award but was only ticketed in coach).
Hotel programs do the same thing. SPG and Hilton have supposedly no capacity controls for awards. However, most other programs do have capacity controls. For example, Priority Club is similar to Hyatt, in that they have no black out dates, but once all the reward rooms are gone, no more space is opened up.
I actually find that Hyatt is pretty decent in terms of award availability, because there aren't so many people with tons of credit card award points taking up room availability. As someone pointed out earlier though, the PH Chicago is both a very desirable property, and an easily accessible one, so it is one of the harder ones to redeem at.