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Have you ever tried booking a hotel room using points at popular hotels? Depending on the hotel chain, you may have encountered room rates soaring into the millions of points per night. Or worse, there is no availability whatsoever. Until now, the best method of searching for hotel award space was skimming flexible date calendars. Unfortunately, this method often requires a significant time investment and can still leave you without a good option.
In 2022, a new website was launched with the goal of simplifying this process: MaxMyPoint. Although it's not available for all hotel programs, it does cover notable ones like World of Hyatt, IHG One Rewards, Marriott Bonvoy, and Hilton Honors.
Let's take a look at MaxMyPoint, how it works for finding hotel award availability, how much it costs, and the best aspects of this website.
Page Contents
What Does MaxMyPoint Do?
MaxMyPoint is a simply designed website that provides real-time award availability at hotels within the Marriott Bonvoy, IHG One Rewards, Hilton Honors, and World of Hyatt portfolios. It first launched in 2022 and has received regular updates and new features since then.
The basic premise is this: You select the hotel chain for which you'd like to see availability, and then the website highlights the most popular points hotels within the respective program. Then, you can search for a property.
Here, you'll see the percentage of rooms with award availability (during the calendar year) and the average redemption rate per 10,000 points redeemed at the property. The site also allows you to set an alert for when availability opens up.
This is incredibly helpful for those sought-after properties since the site tells you at a glance how likely you are to find a room.
How Much Does MaxMyPoint Cost?
MaxMyPoint offers three membership levels. The good news is that the website is absolutely free for anyone to use, and you can even get hotel award alerts without a fee. However, if you're looking at a variety of properties or you'd like to use some of the more sturdy features, you'll need to pay. Here's the breakdown:
| Member | Gold | Platinum | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Active Alerts | 1 | 5 | 15 |
| Hot Hotel Alerts | 1 | 5 | 15 |
| Any Day Alerts | 0 | 2 | 15 |
| Alert Frequency | Every 6 hours | Every 3 hours | As soon as possible |
| Hotel Detail Views | 10 per day | 20 per day | 30 per day |
| Ads Free | No | Yes | Yes |
| Daily Change Alert | No | No | 3 |
| Holiday Alert | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| SMS Alert | No | No | Yes |
| Cost | Free | $3.99 per month or $39.99 per year | $7.99 per month or $79.99 per year |
Here's what all those features mean:
- Active alerts: Alerts you set to be notified when there's hotel award availability for your specific dates.
- Hot hotel alerts: Same alerts but specific to very popular hotels.
- Any-day alerts: Alerts for availability within a range of dates.
- Alert frequency: How quickly you're notified.
- Hotel detail views: How many times per day you can check detailed hotel availability.
- Ads free: Whether or not you see ads.
- Daily change alert: Alerts letting you know when any award availability in the calendar opens or closes.
- Holiday alert: Alerts set for when availability opens up during a holiday.
- SMS alert: Texts you in addition to email.
At just $79.99 per year for a Platinum membership, MaxMyPoint is cheaper than competitors such as StayWithPoints and Awayz.
Related: Hotel Award Search Tools Showdown: MaxMyPoint vs Awayz vs StayWithPoints
Using MaxMyPoint for Your Hotel Award Search
How does MaxMyPoint work? Once you've searched for the hotel you want to stay at (or scrolled the list of hot hotels), click on the property name. This will take you to the calendar view of dates.
In this screenshot, you can see that the Conrad Bora Bora has award availability on 8% of its dates. You can see how many points they're charging and the cash rate for each night.
It's possible to click through the MaxMyPoint calendar to check hotel award availability on a month-by-month basis, but the list view can be more helpful if you're flexible on dates.
The list view will present the entire calendar on a single page. This allows you to quickly see which dates have award availability while scrolling or sorting. You also can search for specific dates.
Additionally, note that not all hotels are consistently updated. Less popular options may not display real-time availability, as you can see here with the Hyatt Regency London – Churchill.
To rectify this, set an alert for the hotel for which you want updated availability. This will force an update to show more recent results.
Setting Alerts on MaxMyPoint
You can set multiple alerts on MaxMyPoint, done in the hotel award search results. Click the bell icon to open the alert tab.
Full stay alerts will only email you if all dates for your stay become available. This means that in the example above, you'll be alerted if standard room rewards open up every night from January 8–13, 2025.
Of course, if you're an experienced award traveler, you probably know that the odds are low for a hotel to suddenly release award space for your whole stay. That's where the any-day alerts come in.
These alerts are available to paid members only but can be enormously helpful in securing a reservation at in-demand properties. In the above example, an any-day alert would notify you if a reward room became available on the 8th, 9th, 10th, etc. Then, you could book each day individually and piece together an itinerary.
Finally, daily change alerts are the best when you simply want to visit a hotel where standard award rooms aren't widely available — making it difficult to plan a trip. Ultra-luxurious properties like the St. Regis Bora Bora or the Waldorf Astoria Maldives Ithaafushi are good examples. Daily change alerts will notify you any time a room becomes available, so you can swoop in and book the room as soon as opens. Then, you can build your trip around the hotel's award availability.
As you can see, you can also set alerts for cash rates with both Hyatt and IHG.
Max FHR
There's one last feature to discuss on MaxMyPoint, which isn't something you'll find with any competitors. As anyone with The Platinum Card® from American Express knows, it can be difficult to use the $200 hotel credit it offers each year. This is because it's limited to prepaid stays with Fine Hotels + Resorts® (FHR), which tend to be expensive.
That's where Max FHR comes in.
It's a little bare bones, but Max FHR allows you to search for a location in which to use your credit. Barring that, it also shows you all the cheapest locations and dates in which it can be used, including filters for how much of an amenity credit you'll receive, whether the property features a special offer, and the price you're willing to pay.
Max FHR is a niche tool but very useful and absolutely free to use, meaning those $200 credits from Amex will never need to go to waste.
Related: How to Receive Elite Hotel Benefits Without Elite Status
The Bottom Line
MaxMyPoint is an incredibly useful tool for redeeming hotel points. Although it doesn't feature every hotel program out there, it covers Marriott, IHG, Hyatt, and Hilton — four major players. Best of all, many features are free to use. Ultimately, though, you'll want to pay for a membership to get the most robust features.
Looking for some inspiration for your first bookings with MaxMyPoint hotel award searches?
- 15 Best Hilton Points Redemptions for Luxury Stays
- 8 Best Hyatt Points Redemptions for Luxury Stays
- 15 Best Marriott Points Redemptions for Luxury Stays
- 13 Top IHG Hotels Redemptions for Luxury Stays
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