Originally Posted by
jbeckett
3. Reserve the four nights. Watch to see if the fifth night becomes available with the same room type as your four night reservation, even though one or more of your first four nights is no longer available for points. Cancel the old reservation, hope that the rooms in the old reservation are returned to be available for points, and then make the new reservation. This strategy is quite risky and you must accept in advance that it may fail. There is a second risk that your points may not be returned immediately to your account when you cancel the first reservation, so it is best to try this only if you have enough points to make the second reservation without relying on the points from the first reservation. Only attempt this if you are willing to lose your points stay in its entirety.
This is probably what I would do. However the issue may be that the 5th night has much higher occupancy. Some hotels take standard rooms out of inventory for this reason but return them to inventory later. Occupancy may fall nearer to the time. In which case you could book the 5 nights. I would agree with jbeckett that you would need the points to book the "second" reservation in full because there have been some recent reports on FT of points not being returned to an account immediately (although I have not had this happen personally).