5 Tips for Scoring Hard-To-Find Hotel Award Availability

We’ve all seen the glamorous images of overwater villas, right? You can’t throw a cell phone these days without hitting a content creator talking about their stunning hotel rooms. And although much of the time those rooms can cost boatloads of cash (we’re talking thousands of dollars per night), redeeming points for your stays can make the aspirational accessible.

The only issue? Finding award availability. With such sought-after properties, finding enough nights for an award stay can feel a lot like searching for an elite member on a Spirit Airlines flight.

Not all is lost, however. Redeeming your points can (and should) be done at these high-end hotels. I should know; I do it all the time.

Here are my top 5 tips so you can, too.

1. Be Flexible With Your Dates

The absolute best way to stay somewhere elusive is to be flexible with your dates. Even at the most sought-after properties, you can find award rooms available throughout the year. While this may be less of an option for those with rigid schedules (such as families working within a school calendar), it’s your best bet for finding award space.

To go along with this, being flexible with your dates doesn’t have to mean missing out on classes or work events. It can also mean choosing to use your scheduled time off to go somewhere where it’s the low season for tourism.

A classic example of this would be traveling during the summer. It’s when nearly everyone takes time off, and most of the time they’re heading to Europe (at least if you’re traveling from the U.S.).

But rather than going to Europe during the summer, when it’s at its hottest, most crowded, and most expensive, why not flip your travel plans and head to the southern hemisphere? Summer in the U.S. means winter in Australia, with cool to moderate temperatures and — you guessed it — way more award availability.

2. Use Hotel Award Search Sites

These last few years have seen a host of hotel award search tools crop up. Rather than relying on a hotel chain’s website, you can now quickly and easily search for award space from multiple chains at once. Even better, they display results for up to a year at a time. These include MaxMyPoint, PointsYeah, Rooms.Aero, StayWithPoints, and Awayz.

My favorite site for this is MaxMyPoint thanks to its no-nonsense design and ability to quickly scan an award calendar to see which dates have availability.

These tools are free to use (up to a certain number of times per day, usually) and are especially useful when it comes to aspirational destinations like the Maldives or Bora Bora.

In this example for the Conrad Bora Bora, you can easily see that 27% of dates within the next year have a standard room reward available.

You can also see which dates are available, the cash cost you’d otherwise be paying, and the cent-per-point value at which you’d be redeeming your points.

Again, this is all free to use. It’s also vastly superior to searching on Hilton’s own website, where you need to poke through a month-by-month calendar to see when rooms are available.

Plus, since hotel award search sites give you results for multiple chains within a few clicks, you end up saving a ton of time versus manually searching every hotel chain’s website.

3. Set Alerts for Award Availability

If you have dates during which you must travel, finding award space can be especially difficult. That’s where setting alerts comes in.

Because booking and canceling an award room at a hotel is generally free, many travelers speculatively book rooms without solid plans.

Then, when it turns out that they can’t actually travel, they cancel the rooms. There’s no way to know if and when this is going to happen. Short of compulsively refreshing your search 4,500 times per day, the odds of you finding an award room right as it’s released back into inventory are pretty low.

That’s why setting an alert is so important. Available from those hotel award search sites I mentioned above, setting alerts is free. They’re not perfect — those who’ve paid for a subscription have their searches repeated more often and thus are more likely to score a room — but it’s a lot better than keeping the Hilton app open on your phone all day.

In addition to alerts for specific dates, those who are willing to pay for premium access can set daily change alerts. These are arguably more valuable than set dates since they notify you anytime a new award room becomes available, no matter the date.

4. Earn Points From Multiple Credit Card Issuers

Finding award nights at hotels is all well and good, at least until you actually need to have the points on hand to redeem a free night. Whether you want to travel to a specific destination or have a hotel that you’re really itching to visit, it’s important that you earn points from as many different sources as possible.

Obviously, earning a lot of points is the best way to make sure you have them when the need arises, but more importantly, earning different types of points gives you the ultimate flexibility for redeeming rewards.

For example, American Express Membership Rewards transfer to 3 different hotel partners:

• Choice Privileges
• Hilton Honors
• Marriott Bonvoy

This means that if you only earn Amex points, you won’t be able to book Hyatt hotels on points, even when the opportunity arises. While there is some overlap between card issuers — Capital One Miles, Citi ThankYou Rewards, and Wells Fargo Rewards also transfer to Choice, for example — hotel chains tend to only partner with 1 or 2 transferable point currencies.

Having variety in the points you earn gives you the freedom to search for hotels from multiple chains without worrying if you’ll have the points to cover them. Plus, it can make expensive redemptions more feasible since you can combine points from multiple currencies in one go.

These 5 are the best flexible currencies to earn and hold:

• Amex Membership Rewards
• Bilt Rewards
• Capital One Miles
• Chase Ultimate Rewards
• Citi ThankYou Rewards

5. Book Way in Advance (Or Way Last-Minute)

It can be difficult to know what you’re doing an entire year in advance, but booking an award room as soon as a hotel’s calendar is up is the most reliable strategy for scoring space. The reason why is obvious: There are only so many rooms at a hotel, and searching for a reservation as soon as possible means you’ll have a higher likelihood of securing one.

On the other hand, since so many travelers book speculatively and cancel later, missing the calendar opening doesn’t mean you’ll never be able to travel. This is why setting alerts can be so handy, since the closer you get to your travel dates the more likely someone cancels.

In addition, many hotel chains hold back rooms from award inventory in the hopes they’ll be able to sell them for cash. As the date approaches, however, they tend to release the rooms as award space since an occupied room is better than an unoccupied one.

Final Thoughts

Finding hotel rooms can be overwhelming, especially if you’re looking for the most popular properties within a hotel’s portfolio. However, this doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to book a stay. Being flexible with your dates, setting alerts, saving time with search engines, earning points from multiple sources, and booking at strategic times will help you achieve the aspirational vacation of your dreams.