Using hotel night free certificates can sometimes be challenging. It’s possible to earn quite a few free night certificates at different brands if you’re active in miles and points. They often come as credit card perks but you can also get them from spending offers, promotions or other activity. Because you usually have to book these certificates one at a time and separate from other reservations, it can sometimes be challenging to use them
(SEE ALSO: Where I “wasted” my 2 IHG free night certificates)
(SEE ALSO: 5 best hotels to use your IHG free night certificate)
Combining A Hyatt Free Night Certificate and Points
I currently have 2 separate Hyatt free night certificates (Category 1-4). One is from the Hyatt Credit Card and the other is the Brand Explorer award from having stayed at 5 different Hyatt Brands
I have an upcoming 4 night stay for our Hawaii Trip that I booked with the Turkish Airlines 7500 mile to Hawaii sweet spot. I was looking at the Hyatt Place Waikiki as one option, but I started wondering “Can I use my free night certificate and points on the same reservation?”. I found this article by My Points Life and it seemed like it would be possible to use points and a free night certificate all on the same reservation
How to use a Free Night Certificate and Points on the Same Hyatt Reservation
It actually is pretty easy to use a free night certificate and points on the same Hyatt reservation. Much easier than my experience trying to combine points and free night certificates at other brands in the past. The trick is that even though you want to use points and free night certificates, when you do your search, you need to select the CASH rates option. That will give you a list of different rooms with their price. You also need to make sure to choose the basic room that is available to book with points. This option for now only works on the Hyatt.com desktop version – not on mobile or on the mobile app.
Once you do, you’ll get a box that looks like this.
Choose “Pay My Way”. If you don’t see the Pay My Way button, it means that your selection is not bookable with points. It could be because the room type you chose is not bookable with points, or you have too many people for a points booking or maybe that you need to book a longer stay to use points. Once you choose Pay My Way, you’ll get another screen where you can choose how you want to pay for your reservation.
As you can see, you can choose cash, points, cash and points or a free night certificate (if you have one in your account). In my case, I wanted to use my free night certificate and 3 nights of points.
Can You Book With Cash and Points and Points On The Same Hyatt Reservation?
Yes – you can book a Hyatt reservation with both cash and points as well as straight points. Because Hyatt doesn’t have any type of 4th night or 5th night free like some other chains, there isn’t any benefit to using all points unless that’s what you prefer. You book your combined reservation in the same way as above, using the Pay My Way feature on Hyatt.com. Once you get the Pay My Way screen, you can choose any combination of points, cash, cash and points or free night certificates that you want
The Bottom Line
Historically it has been my experience that using free night certificates and combining them with other points or cash reservations has been challenging. So I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to combine two types of payments on Hyatt’s website. I booked my 4 night stay using 3 nights paid with points and one free night certificate and it worked out great. And it was quite the added bonus to use miles and points (and certificates) to save over $1,000 on this reservation! Saving over $300 for one night (after taxes) is a pretty good return on investment for a $95 annual fee on the World of Hyatt credit card!
Did you know about how to combine free night certificates and points on a Hyatt reservation? Leave your experience in the comments
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
Can you apply a Suite Upgrade to one of these reservations that contains a cert?
I’m not sure – but if you try it, let us know if it works for you.
Great find, thanks for sharing
This is great, hopefully more hotel chains add this option.
THANK YOU for the ‘pay my way’ tip! Both the chat and phone hyatt reps were totally incompetent and kept telling me that wasn’t possible, but using your method worked!
Awesome! So glad that was able to work for you. Have a great trip!
I have a Hyatt free night Certificate for category 1-4 room. The Hyatt Barcelona Tower is a category 3 hotel. However, when I go into my date next March it is showing 23,000 points for a free room. Is there a way to use my free night certificate to book this room?