Most of the time, booking a hotel stay with points instead of paying out of pocket is going to be the best option. For Hyatts, I usually just have a sense for whether a stay is a solid redemption or not, but if you want more guidance than “Traci’s intuition just knows,” a solid redemption rate to shoot for is getting at least $0.02 per point in value. For example, a hotel night that costs 20,000 Hyatt points is a good redemption, generally speaking, if the going rate for the same room is at least $400/night. ($400.00 / 20,000 = $0.02 per point)

If the going rate is lower than $400/night, then your points aren’t going as far as they theoretically could, and you may want to save them for another redemption that will give you more bang for your points. (Though if your goal is to spend zero out of pocket no matter what, that’s a great goal and you can ignore all of this advice about maximizing your points. A “good redemption” can just mean what enables you to travel, not necessarily what the best value for points is. Do what works for you!)

When you’re booking a hotel and see a high cash rate and relatively low points rate, it’s an obvious value and you don’t even usually have to crunch any numbers—you just see it and know. But if the cash rate is low enough that it makes you wonder, “Wait, is this really a good value to book with points?” then you may have to get the calculator out and confirm.

We ran into this exact scenario when we booked our hotel rooms for Kyoto for 2025. We wanted to stay at the Hyatt Regency Kyoto because it was in a good sweet spot of being nice, well-located, and somewhat luxurious but also not costing as much as the Park Hyatt Kyoto. You can walk through this example with me and then use this same logic the next time you’re figuring out how to pay for a Hyatt stay.

We needed two rooms (occupancy limits were two people per room) and each room would cost 20,000 points per night. And we’d be staying for three nights. So total that would cost us 120,000 points. And I of course looked at the points-booking options first.

But then I looked at the cash price for the rooms and was pleasantly surprised—a room was going for about $230 per night. For us, it made sense to think about just paying out of pocket for those hotel nights and saving our points for other redemptions where we could get more out of them.

What else could we use those points for ? Well, all four of us could fly round-trip to the UK for 120,000 points on Virgin Atlantic! Our that could cover three people’s round-trip flights anywhere in Europe on Air France. Or my husband and I could stay three nights at a super-luxurious 40,000-point-per night property like a Park Hyatt, where the going rate is over $1,000 per night. So given all those other ways we could spend the 120,000 points, that seemed like a pretty steep price for three nights at a nice-but-not-jaw-dropping hotel in Kyoto.

In this example, the $230/night x 2 rooms x 3 nights came to about $1,400.

So another way to look at this from a wider perspective was that spending 120,000 points on the same stay would have to be worth no more than $1,400 to us to make this a smart redemption. And it wasn’t, because we could use those 120,000 points to fly three or four of us round-trip to Europe, which costs much more than $1,400 out of pocket! So our points would be better maximized if we saved them.

I still have no idea why this Hyatt Regency Kyoto was making rooms available at such a low price compared to, say, the Hyatt House Tokyo Shibuya, which was offering rooms at over $600 per night that same week. (That one, we did book with points because the value was amazing at 12,000 to 15,000 points per room per night.) But we’re lucky to be able to spend some money out of pocket on hotels in situations like these, and even better, because I’m a Hyatt cardholder and I have Discoverist status, I’ll earn 14x booking this stay and charging it to my Hyatt card. So after taxes and fees on the paid stay, we’ll end up earning about 15,000 Hyatt points that we can use for future Hyatt redemptions.

Using points is usually the best option, but it’s always worth thinking about the redemption value if you think it might make more sense to use money instead of points to pay for your stay.

Caution: This calculation advice only applies to Hyatt points stays. This guidance won’t work for Hilton, Marriott, or IHG hotels because those hotel chains’ points pricing is wildly different from Hyatt’s and $0.02 per point in redemption value is not the goal there.