My first solid hotel points redemption with Hyatt

After years of hoarding my credit card points for a solid hotel redemption, I’ve finally found one. I tend to not use my points unless the opportunity truly presents itself. That happens whenever there is an amazing points deal or if the cash price is extremely high and it’d be a lot more reasonable to use points. The latter is what happened here.

The Hyatt Centric in Ginza is located very close to Tokyo Station and is in the heart of both Ginza and Tokyo. For the 3 nights I’ll be staying, it costs $1,000 per night (yes, that’s in USD) per room. Clearly, I was not willing to pay this kind of rate for the room.

Good news: I didn’t have to. There were rooms available at 29,000 Hyatt points per night.

Chase points can be transferred to Hyatt. In my case, I had over 300,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points in my account. I was actually quite ecstatic that I could finally use 87,000 of my points for a worthy redemption.

Booking the stay was a bit stressful. I had to hope that Hyatt’s availability was not “phantom” availability. Once I transferred points from Chase to Hyatt, I could not transfer them back. If Hyatt did not have any availability, I’d be screwed. Thankfully, Hyatt did have the availability and my booking went through without any delays or mishaps.

Now, a $3,000 stay has turned into an almost-free stay (not including the tourist tax and other fees I’ll have to pay at check-in).

To sum things up, I paid 87,000 points for 3 nights (at 29,000 points each) rather than $3,000. That makes the redemption rate almost 3.5¢, which is solidly above the consensus rate of 2¢ per Chase point.

I have to thank MaxMyPoint for showing the points availability calendar for Hyatt hotels. Here’s what it looks like for Tokyo as of September 2023:

This gave me the information I needed. Don’t even try for the Park Hyatt and go for a hotel like the Hyatt Regency, Grand Hyatt, or the Hyatt Centric.

Unfortunately for me, the Grand Hyatt and Hyatt Regency just so happened to not have any points availability for the three nights I wanted to stay in Tokyo, despite them having open availability on most other nights that month.