Hotels can be one of the most expensive parts of any trip, which is why many travelers often turn to points to help cover the cost of a stay.
Whether you’re earning Hyatt, Hilton, Marriott, or IHG points or you’ve got transferable credit card points, there are some tricks to finding the best rates. With some programs, it’s easy to zero in on the cheapest free night awards. But there are also a handful of tools like rooms.aero you can use to easily search for award availability – rooms that are actually bookable with points – whether you’ve got specific dates and a property in mind or you’re just looking for the best rates.
Better yet, if you don’t want to do the work of finding hotel award availability yourself, you could let us do the work for you. Our Thrifty Traveler Premium flight deal alert service now comes with the option to add on hotel alerts, too. For an extra $24.99 a year, members can opt in and start getting alerts to book some of the best properties in the U.S. and across the globe using their Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, or Marriott points – or other transferrable points.
Read on for how to scope out the best hotel deals no matter what points you earn and where you’re traveling to.
Start With the Hotel's Flexible Calendar
This should be your first stop. When searching for award nights through each of the major hotel chains (and some are easier than others), there's a way to pull up a calendar of available dates to help you zero in on the cheapest rates. The key is being flexible with your travel dates.
Hilton
Let's take a look at Hilton. For the lowest-and-best rates redeeming Hilton Honors points, you'll want to search for what Hilton calls “standard room awards.”
If you've got some flexibility in your schedule, you're not going to want to put in specific dates. Just input a destination without inputting a check-in and check-out date.
The website will display all of the opinions for your selected destination showing the lowest price each property is charging. Proceed to click “Select Dates” to view the flexible calendar.
Choosing the Hilton Tokyo, a flexible award calendar will appear if you ensure you selected “Use Points & Money”. Here, you'll also see a full month's award availability and can easily navigate between months to find the lowest possible rates bookable with points.
Read more: A Complete Guide to Hilton Honors: Free Nights, Credit Cards & More
Marriott
Marriott Bonvoy also uses dynamic pricing for its award nights, so how many points you need to book a property will vary depending on when you're looking to stay. To find the cheapest rates, you'll want to pull up the calendar view.
Search for the property you want to book, but instead of entering “Specific Dates,” toggle over to “Flexible Dates” and select how many nights you'd like to stay.
Here, you you'll see a full month's availability and can easily navigate between months to find the lowest possible price. The lowest rates are highlighted in green.
Read more: A Complete Guide to Marriott Bonvoy: Free Nights, Credit Cards & More
Hyatt
As for World of Hyatt, you'll need to put in specific dates for a property and then click on the “Points Calendar.” With that tool, you can quickly click through the entire calendar to see how many points each night will cost you and find the cheapest award rates. Unfortunately, this calendar view just shows you award rates, not actual availability.
To find nights that are actually bookable, you'll have to search individual dates, or use another award search tool. More on that later.
Read more: A Complete Guide to World of Hyatt: Free Nights, Credit Cards & More
IHG
As for IHG One, it's a little quirky, but you have to first find a property that is not available to be booked with points, like this Hotel Indigo Rome – St. George property. Since this hotel is not available to book with points (only cash) for the night I searched, I'm given the option to “View available dates” which pulls up a calendar with all the award nights that are available.
It's counterintuitive to have to search for an unavailable property to find available nights, but this way, you'll be able to pull up the calendar to scroll through each month and find the cheapest rates possible when using points. If you have a flexible schedule, sometimes shifting your stay by a day or two can save you thousands of points.
Read more: A Complete Guide to IHG One Rewards: Free Nights, Credit Cards, & More
Level Up with an Award Search Tool
Hotels' own sites can be tricky to navigate, especially if you're trying book several nights with points at the best rates. Luckily, there's a wealth of smart tools that you could use to more efficiently scope out award availability of the hotels you're eyeing.
Gone are the days of manually searching for each date that you're interested in booking: These tools will do much of the work for you.
Awayz (Through Bilt)
With Bilt Rewards‘s nifty hotel award search tool powered by Awayz, members can use the Bilt website or app to search or real-time award availability at Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt and IHG properties. It's possibly the easiest way to find available nights to book with your points.
If you have a Bilt account (it's free to join), you can head to the mobile app or the website and click on “Rewards” and then the “Travel” tab. Then, select the “Hotels” option.
From here, the tool will give you the option to search for hotels through the Bilt Travel Portal or with Bilt's hotel transfer partners. To take advantage of this functionality available through Awayz, you'll want to select the transfer partners option. Then, enter your destination, desired dates, and which hotel program you have points with – or you can search across all four hotel chains.
In this example, I searched for available award nights at various properties in Tokyo. From here, you can also filter for the hotel chain where I have points.
Select a property to pull up the calendar view for the next year. I selected the Conrad Tokyo below.
As you can see, the Awayz tool available through Bilt will quickly show you what nights are actually available to book with points. It'll also highlight the cheapest date each month in green – much like you'll find when looking at flight prices through our favorite tool, Google Flights.
At this point, simply click on any of the nights and select “Browse Available Rooms” to take you directly to the hotel's booking page.
This tool is especially useful for finding award availability at Hyatt and IHG properties, as neither hotel chain makes it easy to find dates that are actually bookable with points.
Whether you have Bilt points or hotel points through a different rewards program, you can use this tool to search for award nights to use them. All you need is a Bilt account.
Read more: Bilt Rewards Adds a Great New Way to Find Hyatt, IHG Award Availability
Rooms.aero
One of the most talked about award search tools for flights these days is seats.aero, but they've got a tool for hotels, too: rooms.aero.
While seats.aero lets you search award availability across 16 different airline loyalty programs, rooms.aero just covers the four major hotel chains: Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, and IHG.
But unlike the flight service, rooms.aero is free. With the free version, you can search an entire year's worth of hotel award availability.
Start by clicking search and entering your desired destination, whether you want to search a specific city or an entire country. You can then filter your results by hotel program as well as how many points a property charges per night – which is especially useful for only showing hotels where you can afford to book.
For instance, here's what I see when searching for Hyatt, Hilton, and Marriott properties in Rome that charge no more than 80,000 points per night.
Once you've identified a hotel, simply click on the property on the left-hand side to view the availability for the year. We selected The Tribute, a Hyatt property. You could also reference the useful map on the right to check where the properties are located relative to attractions and major cities.
Once you're ready to book, click on the “i” icon on the right to lead you to the booking page.
If you're flexible with your destination, you could start by selecting a hotel chain like World of Hyatt by clicking “Explore” to see where and when the cheapest award rates are.
Then, you will sort by clicking “Standard Room” to pull up the cheapest points bookings available under Hyatt's brand through the next year.
You will then want to sort by “Arrival Dates” as well as apply any of the necessary filters above regarding how many nights you would like to stay, include/exclude specific brands, award chart categories, location, and points value.
Thrifty Tip: Once you select a hotel chain, go to the “Countries” filter and deselect “United States” as that is on by default and will exclude every other country.
MaxMyPoint
There's also MaxMyPoint.com, an incredibly useful tool to view flexible calendar availability for nights bookable with points at Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, and IHG properties.
The service is free unless you want to set up availability alerts.
On the homepage, search for any property among the four hotel chains and select “Calendar” to view the flexible calendar that displays points and cash rates.
Typically, you'll be looking at the blue blocks that indicate the cheapest nights available to be booked with points. Green blocks are the various room types and corresponding cash rates available.
The site also color-codes nights by room type when booking with points.
Here's key to help guide you through which room rate is which.
With points, you'll get more variety in the color-coding as it'll show you the points required to book a standard room versus a club room or a suite.
You could click any of the dates that would lead you directly to the booking page if the night is still available. Each entry will show the lowest points rate for each night.
Get Hotel Alerts Sent Directly to Your Inbox
Or you can let the best hotel deals come to you by signing up for a service like Thrifty Traveler Premium. For an additional $24.99 a year, members who subscribe to our flight deal alert service can opt in and start getting hotel alerts to book some of the best properties in the U.S. and across the globe using their Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, or Marriott points – or transferrable credit card points from banks like Chase and American Express.
We scour the world for award availability at top-rated hotels, brand-new properties, and all-inclusive resorts near and far, sending an alert when you can book them with points – and step-by-step instructions on how to book.
Keep in mind: Only Thrifty Traveler Premium members can opt in for hotel alerts: We're not selling this as a standalone service – at least not for now.
Current Premium members can simply log into their online account and select the new “Hotel Deals” option in the main menu.
Meanwhile, first-time Thrifty Traveler Premium subscribers will see the option to add on Hotel Alerts after signing up for Flight Deal Alerts and setting their preferences. In either case, you'll pay just $24.99 more a year for Hotel Alerts.
Once you add Hotel Alerts to your subscription, you'll have the option to filter for deals from the four major hotel chains: Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, and Marriott. You can get deals from just one or two of these hotel chains or all four!
Once you're all signed up, you'll be able to click over to Hotel Deals in your Premium hub and see each and every alert we've sent.
Read more: From Island Resorts to 5-Star Properties, The Best Hotel Alerts We’ve Sent (So Far!)
Bottom Line
Now you know that there are many useful tools out there to help you scavenge for worthwhile hotels to book for your next trip. If you have a stash of hotel or transferrable credit card points, use this guide to find the best rates and rooms you can actually book.