Spain 2020: Hotel Planning (Continued)

NOTE -> This trip occurred pre-COVID-19 and feels like 100 years ago

I had placeholder reservations in all three cities, but I wasn’t happy with any of my selections. I felt I could do better and I continued to try to find a solution I was more comfortable with.

I had been going back and forth over whether to get a suite or separate rooms. About a month before the trip, I was leaning more towards the single room option so I went looking again in Barcelona to see if I could find a suite that didn’t hit the wallet too hard.

I had found the AC hotel package deals in Madrid and Valencia that included breakfast for not much more of a rate increase of those without breakfast, though the Madrid reservation was for two rooms. I looked at other AC hotels in Barcelona to see if I had missed something in my previous searches. In the end I found a suite option for a hotel not far from Camp Nou which is where FC Barcelona plays. The rate was around $250/night for the suite and that seemed reasonable. It was only $50 more per night than what I had reserved at the Four Points by Sheraton. I wasn’t sure how good the location was, but at the time the suite was the priority so I booked it. I knew I needed a refundable rate given how unsure of everything I was at the time.

We already had a suite booked in Valencia so I double checked our options in Madrid. There weren’t any Marriott suites available for anything less than several thousand Euros a night so those weren’t an option.

This year I’ve been trying to build up my Hyatt status for some stays we have coming up this summer. I had checked several times for hotels in all three cities. They don’t have any properties in Valencia so Marriott was the option there. The properties in Barcelona were all quite expensive, even for rooms that only worked with two people and there were several other options from Marriott that were much cheaper.

In Madrid, there were only two properties available with suites that held 4 people and the cheapest was $650/night and well our of our price range. I checked to see if it was cheaper to do two rooms because sometimes suites are much more expensive, but the single room was stil $300/night.

This got me thinking, though. With Hyatt, they have some interesting ways you can use points to upgrade rooms. They have two categories of suites, standard and premium. If you’re booking with points, a premium suite is double the number of points of the room. So a 25,000 point night for a room turns into 50,000 points per night for a premium suite (which is what the room we were looking at in Madrid would cost). At that many points it didn’t make sense to use points on that room.

As I read deeper, there are other options for using points to upgrade on a paid stay. There’s a flat rate of 6,000 points/night to upgrade from a regular room to a standard suite and 9,000 points/night to upgrade from a regular room to a premium suite. This seemed promising as those 9,000 points per night would give us $350/night in value, more than twice what I personally value each Hyatt point to be worth when deciding whether a redemption is worthwhile or not.

Since I could only book a room for 2 people, I wasn’t sure that I could upgrade to a premium suite and then update the room to have all 4 of us on the reservation. I didn’t want to have “extra people” that were unexpected at checkin. To test out if I could do this, I booked a refundable rate for one adult and one child.

I then called up the Hyatt reservation line to ask about an upgrade to a suite. This upgrade process can only be one over the phone. The agent I talked with knew what I was asking for and saw the room type we wanted showing as available to upgrade to so we proceeded with he upgrade.

The agent confirmed I would pay the normal room rate I had booked and would be deducted 9,000 points/night (36,000) from my account which I had just earned as a bonus from meeting my spending requirement on my World of Hyatt card. The booking cancelation rules still applied so I could cancel with no penalty (points would be put back into my account if I canceled) until 48 hours of my stay.

Of course I forgot to see if they could update the occupancy of the room from 2 people to 4 before a hung up so I immediately called back and got that sorted out before I forgot. I was pretty proud of myself as I had used a few points I had just earned as a bonus to book what looked like a fantastic suite for about the same amount of cash per night as at the AC hotel in a part of town that didn’t seem as nice.

Back to the Valencia booking I noticed the suite I had booked only had 2 adults and one child on the itinerary. Looking deeper at the room details, while it had two queen beds and a sleeper sofa, the maximum occupancy was still only 3 people. I couldn’t change it online, but by this time I was also leaving more towards two rooms instead of a suite. For example, we could rent two rooms at a nearby Westin and could get breakfast for all four of us for about $100/night less than we were paying for the suite. Rather than call and try to update that reseveration to have the right number of people, I decided to look at the other options in the city for 2 rooms.

I found there was a Westin and two AC hotels that were good options. One of the AC hotels we had booked the suite in, but the other one looked to be in a better location for what we were looking at doing and was cheaper. Looking deeper into the rates, they had a breakfast package price that was actually 2 euros LOWER per night than the option without breakfast! Both rates were fully prepaid AAA rates so they weren’t refundable, but we were less than a week from going on the trip and the rate was too good to pass up. I booked one room on my account (platinum status) and one on my wife’s account (higher titanium status) and canceled the other reservation.

Next I wondered if I could find similar value in our Barcelona hotel which had become less attractive due to it’s location and price. I wondered about the same Hyatt upgrade trick I had gotten to work with the Madrid hotel, but that was not an option in Barcelona as the properties were too expensive to begin with. In Madrid all the hotels were expensive so the room I had to book on cash there wasn’t far out of line with the rest of the market.

In Barcelona I found a better Marriott option booking two rooms was the Four Points by Sheraton that we had originally booked and canceled. Even though it was a week before travel, the rate was less than we had booked it the first time. Since we were elite members we could get breakfast for free as well. We hoped the status would also allow us to get rooms close to each other. The rate also saved us about $100/night compared to the suite we had booked.

I ended up booking one room under my wife’s account and for whatever reason procrastinated to book the second room under my own account until the next morning. At that time I found the same AAA rate was now unavailabile! My heart sunk, but I adjusted the days to the last 2 days of our trip instead of the full 3 days and the rate seemed to be available. My guess is that the rate was only available up to 7 days before travel and I was booking 6 days out while I had booked 7 days out the previous night on my wife’s account.

I booked the two nights that rate was available for and then called the Marriott reservations line to see if they could add a night to the beginning of my reservation. I figured they may have to book a higher rate for that one night but at least I’d have 2 of the nights at the better rate. The agent gave me the pleasant news that she could get me the same AAA rate for the first night, and that the rate was even lower than for the second two nights. Score! While I had her on the line I asked if she could put a note in both our reservations that we’d prefer adjacent or connecting rooms if available. I asked if she could do the same for our rooms in Valencia as well and she managed to update all four reservations (two each for my wife and myself).

Now you may be wondering why I made two separate reservations at each hotel instead of one reservation for two rooms. It comes down to status. If my wife booked both rooms in Barcelona, she would only get qualifying night credits for one of the rooms and would only qualify for breakfast for the two people in one of those rooms. By booking two different reservations, my account would get an elite night credit and would also get free breakfast. It’s all about free breakfast with us!

With that drama over, we FINALLY had our rooms set within only a few days of travel. I think I canceled more reservations this trip than any other, but I was satisfied with the hotel choices at long last.