Originally Posted by
Kacee
It's happened before that when specific properties have been called out here on FT for award availability shenanigans, the issue gets fixed pretty quickly.
GP Concierge remains one of the best things Hyatt has going for it.
Respectfully, that's completely false--rarely are these issues resolved. And GP Concierge has flat out said
this isn't a problem they will investigate, instead saying they "encourage members that find a potential situation relating to award availability to contact their nearest Global Contact Center for assistance and research."
There is already a massive, 14+ page thread discussing hotel violators. Just today I found that the Hyatt Chicago (owned by Hyatt!) is again gaming the system by making many (most?) of their standard rooms listed as "high floor" rooms which--you guessed it--can't be booked for free nights. Let's see how quickly Hyatt fixes this...
In the meantime, there are two major issues always at play with Hyatt properties gaming award night availability:
1. The offending hotel moves many of their standard rooms to rooms like "high floor" "xxx view" where nothing changed but now it's not available for award nights. This happens A LOT (including at corporate-owned hotels) and Hyatt doesn't seem to care. I personally told Jeff Zidell about this issue in November, so they can't pretend not to know about it.
2. The hotel moves their standard rooms out of the 'Hyatt Daily Rate' booking category and only into package rates. This also keeps it from being used for award nights.
The other, less reported issue is when a hotel simply removes all 'standard rooms' around their busy periods. The Hyatt Place North Shore (Pittsburgh) does this around every Steelers game and the Andaz Maui is notorious for doing this and also requiring absurd 7+ night stays for award rates--meaning that 95% of people can't do it simply because they don't have that many points in their account!
For the record, this (combined with the WoH mess) is why I'm dumping my points. WoH eliminated check-in (500/1k) bonuses and made it much more difficult to keep top-tier status, while simultaneously making it harder every year to redeem points for free nights. It's simply not worth my loyalty, despite Hyatt having some great properties in Hawaii & Europe.