Having a son at school at USC, we have tried lots of hotels in LA as I usually book where I can stay for free on points, and this usually depends on where I have the most points and where I can get the lowest redemption. To be close to campus, we have often selected hotels that were downtown like the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown, Sheraton Grand and the JW Marriott LA Live. We have also spent a couple of luxurious nights at the Waldorf Astoria in Beverly Hills.
But, if you follow me on social media, you may know that I am desperately trying to maintain my World Of Hyatt Globalist status for 2023. We are therefore going with a Hyatt property for our stay in August when my son is heading back for the fall semester.
So I have booked a stay at the Andaz in West Hollywood. The hotel was only 20,000 World of Hyatt points per night, with the last night, Friday, being 23,000 points. So in total 83,000 points. These rooms would have cost about $500 per night with taxes and fees, so a total of about $2,000. I actually happened to have a lot of Hyatt Points because, like I said, I am trying to maintain Globalist status, so I often break out my Chase World Of Hyatt card where I get 2 nights for every $5k in spend. I need 60 nights for Globalist status, I currently have a mere 19.
But, when I went to book the stay, I was about 4,000 points short. Luckily World Of Hyatt is a Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer partner and I easily and instantaneously transferred 4,000 points over from Chase Ultimate Rewards to Hyatt.
Now lets see how I did in my value calculation. World of Hyatt points are valued at about 1.7 cents per point in the industry and Chase points are valued at about 2 cents per point. So the value of points that I used for this stay is $1343 (79,000 x .017) and $80 (4,000 x .02), for a total of $1423. The stay would have cost $2,000, so I gained value using my points!
Know, it deosn’t always happen like this, but when it does, I am quite pleased.