MaxMyPoint Is the Best Way To Search for Hotel Award Availability

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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 in the millions of points per night. Or worse: no availability whatsoever. Until now, the best method of searching for hotel award space was skimming calendars. Unfortunately, this method often is burdensome and requires a significant time investment.

Last year, a new website launched with the goal of simplifying this the process. Although it's not available for all hotel programs, it does cover World of Hyatt, 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.

What Does MaxMyPoint Do?

MaxMyPoint is a simply-designed website built to give you real-time award availability at hotels within the Marriott Bonvoy, Hilton Honors, and World of Hyatt portfolios. It first launched in 2022, and the site has seen 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, 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), the cent-per-point values you'll receive when redeeming points, and whether it's a good value. In addition, the site also gives you the option 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?

There are three levels of membership to MaxMyPoint. 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:

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.

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 Andaz Maui at Wailea Resort has award availability on 40% of its dates. This figure includes both standard rooms and standard suites. 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. You also can search for specific dates.

MaxMyPoint isn't perfect, though. Previously, it couldn't account for minimum stay requirements set by hotels. This meant that properties like Calala Island (a Small Luxury Hotels property at which you can redeem Hyatt points) consistently showed 0% availability.

However, it's now tracking most minimum stay requirements as of July 2023. Time will tell how accurately this works with hotels not all having the same minimum stay requirements (or even varying requirements at the same property, depending on the time of year).

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 January 8–13, 2024.

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, the 9th, the 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 finding 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.

MaxMyPoint's Map Feature

There's one last MaxMyPoint feature to discuss, though it's still in beta. Even if it's not totally polished, it represents a huge improvement over other outdated and largely-defunct search maps.

Here, you can see a map of award hotels in London participating Hilton's, Hyatt's, and Marriott's programs. However, it's possible to filter by chain and even brand.

The numbers on the map represent the max cent-per-point value you'll get when booking these hotels. This makes it simple to remove less-valuable redemptions. The map doesn't support live award availability yet, but that'd be a great feature to see in the future.

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, Hyatt, and Hilton — three major players. Best of all, many features are free to use. Ultimately, though, you'll want 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
• 15 Best Hyatt Points Redemptions for Luxury Stays
• 15 Best Marriott Points Redemptions for Luxury Stays

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