Originally Posted by sdsearch

In general, gift cards don't tend to work for advance purchase rates. You'd have to have a field on the prepay reservation page to enter a gift card for it to work with those.

And you can't refund a prepay rate. That's the whole point of prepay!

But these gift cards don't expire, so keep them until you either have a non-prepay rate, or you have sufficient incidentals to have hotel charges >$50 even with a prepay rate.