HIX Award Room Policy
 

I was trying to look for award availability in the Anaheim area and found HIX Anaheim-South at 20,000/night that would be perfect. Awesome redemption number with shuttle service to Disneyland. However, the only rooms offered at the award rate were Kings with a 2 person capacity, although they have 2 Queen rooms with a 4 person capacity available for cash. Is it generally the HIX award room policy to make King rooms the only rooms available for award redemption? I honestly can't tell if the 2 Queen rooms have any additional characteristics that would make it "non-standard" but I was just wondering if I need to cross out HIX locations from my possible award redemption locations for my family.

It's certainly not a policy across the brand, but for some hotels yes. I would make the points reservation and then contact the hotel to see if they will place you in a 2 queen room. They will likely say yes for free, yes for a fee, or no. Then you can decide from there whether to stick with your booking.

Thanks for the advice. That sounds like a good way of doing it, probably safer than trying to count on an "upgrade" at the FD with my "elite" status.

Likely what happened here is that within a context where a hotel makes a limited number of rooms available for award stays, the award inventory of 2-Queen rooms was already booked leaving only the 1-King room(s) showing available for redemption. There's no reason to suspect that the entire hotel brand or even one particular property limits redemptions to only one bed configuration.

I have seen this a lot when looking for award stays in NYC. Much larger set of IHG properties offering only King rooms for award stays even though two Queen rooms are still available for cash. In NYC there are enough options, that I can usually find a property that works anyway. For your case since there is really only one property, hopefully they will agree to give you a 2 Queen room for your stay. Please advise us how it turns out. I have never tried calling the NYC properties but perhaps I should.

--Jon

I am looking for second week of October, so a long ways out. I guess I should call and find out to make sure.

There's an easy way to find out - just try other dates

Some hotels definitely only allow one or two categories of room on redemptions, others may even let you redeem a suite at the regular rate (rare)

I have used this technique to find hotels which include two queen bed rooms available for award stays. What I haven't tried is calling a property that typically doesn't include them to see if they are willing to do so.

--Jon

The phone call solves the problem definitively or not. Doesn't really matter what the policy is. What matters is whether this property on OP's day(s) will provide the room he wants and, if so, at what cost (hopefully $0).