Good evening everyone, I hope you all had a great Mother’s Day Weekend. Last week, I wrote about my Summer plans to Europe, including stops in Dublin, Helsinki, and Stockholm. We are starting in Dublin and wanted to stay 4 nights at the Hyatt Centric The Liberties Dublin. The Hyatt Centric is centrally located and costs 18,000 Hyatt Points per night. Unfortunately, there was a small issue… the 4th night of our stay was completely sold out on points and cash.
We booked the first 3 nights of the stay using a combination of Laura’s Hyatt Free Night Certificate and 36,000 Hyatt Points for the next 2 nights. I then set up hotel alerts for the last night of our stay in the hope that award availability would open up before our trip. Here is my underwhelming experience with MaxMyPoint, Awayz & StayWithPoints hotel award alerts.
Image source: https://www.hyatt.com/hyatt-centric/dubct-hyatt-centric-the-liberties-dublin/gallery
Laura booked the first night of the stay with her Hyatt Free Night Certificate and used points for the next 2 nights on April 12. I then signed up for free accounts with MaxMyPoint, Awayz & StayWithPoints to create award alerts. In a perfect world, one (or all 3) services would notify me within seconds (or minutes or hours) when award availability was available for the last night.
Many days went by without any award alerts and I manually checked award space using the Hyatt app a few times every day. Still no luck, until the morning of May 10. After almost a month of waiting and searching, I got lucky and found award space for the last night. Laura confirmed the award space twice and then proceeded to cancel the 2 night reservation booked with points at 6:24am.
Once the 36,000 Hyatt Points were refunded back to Laura’s Hyatt account, she made a new 3 night reservation (2 minutes after cancelling the above award). She then emailed the hotel to link the 2 reservations together so we would not need to check out and change rooms.
An hour later, the MaxMyPoint hotel alert email arrived at 7:34am. If I didn’t do my manual Hyatt award search that morning, this email alert would have been super helpful. I wondered how soon I would receive alerts from the other 2 services…
More than 3 days later, I finally received an alert from Awayz on May 13. I was dissapointed since Awayz has such a great hotel award search tool, but their alerts are seriously slacking.
Here is my free Awayz plan. I don’t have any more free hotel award searches available, so I may need to upgrade to a paid plan in the future, but I will not rely on the award alerts.
Last and certainly least, StayWithPoints still has not sent me an alert, even though it says they check for award space every hour and it was last checked this afternoon.
I only have these data points to base my first impressions on, but as of now, I would recommend MaxMyPoint for hotel alerts and only use Awayz for their hotel award search tool. I am curious if readers had different / better results with these 3 hotel award alert tools. If so, please share your experience in the comments below.
PointsYeah currently has airline award alerts, but not hotel award alerts, but their new PointsYeah hotel search tool works really well and I would recommend that over Awayz since Awayz has a limit on the number of searches you can do with a free account, but there is no limit for PointsYeah.
If you have any questions about any of these services, please leave a comment below. Have a great day everyone!
Grant, my experiences mirror yours. MaxMyPoint has always been first for me when it comes to alerts for hotels. Just like though, I have manually beat all three programs with manual checks. To be fair, I can say the same thing about my paid subscription to ExpertFlyer for airline upgrade availability and even seats becoming open. I’d highly recommend to anyone, while alerts for hotels and airlines are great – if it’s *that* important to you, you really can’t stop the manual checks if you want to increase your odds of success.
Hi John, I totally agree with you. The more time and effort you put into award searching, the better results you will have.
I too have found maxmypoint to be the fastest. This morning I received an alert and immediately booked the hotel and maybe 10 minutes layer I received a notification from maxmypoint saying that night was no longer available
Wow, I’m glad you were able to get that hotel award booked before it sold out again. I wonder how many other people had the same hotel award alert set and received the same alert you did. Glad you acted fast!
Newer site(s) so not as well known that provide alerts, calendars, etc
RateDrop.com – monitors rates to let you know when rate (cash or points) drops or when sold-out rooms/hotels becomes available. Unique feature is can monitor specific room types so great when trying to use a Hyatt SUA or other hotels award certificates
HotelMattressRun.com – search over any 90 day period (for stays up to 14 nights) to find the least expensive hotels/nights in any area.
PointCalendar.com – availability calendar with alerts
Hi RD, thank you for those 3 links. I have never used or heard of them, but I added them to my travel bookmarks and will give them a try the next time I try to book a difficult hotel award. Are there any other airline tools you use?
HotelMattressRun has worked great for finding cheap Marriott stays during their double elite night promos. Didn’t realize there were other sites they ran as well, will have to try them out.
That’s good to know, thank you Andrew.