Easily find Hyatt, Hilton & IHG Award Nights & What's a Mattress Run?
Planning for 2024 Hotel Elite Status!
Advertiser Disclosure
Some of the credit card offers that appear on this site are from credit card companies from which allwaysaway.com receives compensation if you are approved. Compensation impacts banner placement, but does not impact the articles posted on allwaysaway.com. This site does not include all credit card offers available in the marketplace.
New to credit card points & miles? Start with the mini-course or share it with a friend!
Hello hello!
As we approach the final 60 days of the year, it’s a good time to audit all your annual credits and elite status qualifications to optimize any remaining travel for the year. After a quick audit from our side, we have:
44 nights at Marriott
26 nights at Hyatt
$148 (of $300) travel credit from a Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Card
You’ll also want to check:
Chase Sapphire Reserve® Card ($300 annual travel credit)
Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card ($50 Ultimate Rewards hotel credit)
Various free night certificates from cobranded hotel cards
And of course the more obscure credits like the $50 rebate at Saks 5th Ave via The Platinum Card® from American Express, but let’s focus on hotels today.
Given our audit, what should we do?
Marriott: The best way to book award nights at Marriott properties is in 5-night blocks since the 5th night is free, essentially giving you a 20% discount on the stay. Since I’ll be closing my Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant® American Express® Card due to the annual fee increasing from $450 to $650, I’ll no longer maintain automatic Platinum Elite Status with Marriott, meaning I’ll lose 4pm check-out and free breakfast.
Enter Mattress Runs!
A mattress run is typically a low cost award travel trip to rack up elite nights and ensure you maintain a status that you find valuable. If you’re always checking out at 8am, then perhaps you don’t care about Platinum status, but I’ve found it incredibly valuable, especially when you’re moving from one hotel to another and the second hotel is quite strict about their 3/4pm check-in time. It means you’ll always have a private place to catch up on work while on the road.
Hotel Mattress Run makes it very easy to search nearby hotels and query multiple dates at once to ensure both availability and savings regardless of if you’re paying within points or cash. Just remember that booking the hotel is not enough, you must show in order to get the elite night credits.
While some points bloggers value status more than others, especially the coveted Hyatt Globalist, I’m only interested in booking nights at places that I’ll actually enjoy staying at. Those stays can be extraordinarily expensive in major cities like New York and San Francisco, but by venturing an hour or so outside the city you’re bound to find a deal via HMR.
For our final Marriott 6 nights at Marriott, we’re heading down to the greater DC area, which is well known as a place with an abundance of hotels that can vary quite significantly in pricing depending on political schedules. I was quite enthusiastic to find a mid-tier Marriott for roughly 20k points per night in a great area.
Broader Hotel Reward Night Availability
Mattress Runs are an extreme case for a select few of us, but if you’re just interested in getting a head start on planning hotel stays for the year ahead, I’d encourage you to check out Rooms.aero
Just like their original Seats.aero for award flights, they managed to simplify the process of finding hotel reward availability in a beautiful interface. I was particularly excited to see Hyatt Reward Availability so beautifully catalogued by destination country, allowing me to search all of Japan and sort by dates for the year ahead.
Note that Rooms.aero is currently in Beta and thus available to use across the full calendar for free, but akin to Seats.aero in the early days, as they continue to improve upon the service it will likely move into a freemium model where it’s limited to only the next 90 days and requires a subscription beyond that.
As a very happy Seats.aero subscriber, I highly recommend it, but if you’re not booking any vacations for the year ahead, it’s likely worth waiting until you have the time off and the points to do so.
Travel Portals Credits for Elite Status
A pro-tip for those of you who also have credits from portals like Capital One Travel or Chase Ultimate Rewards: nights booked via portals may not qualify as elite status nights. Technically nights booked via credit card portals and travel aggregators like Expedia, Booking, etc should never qualify, but in my experience sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t.
If you’re only a few nights away from Elite Status, you can start your quest with a night booked via a portal, but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t count despite associating your loyalty number.
If you’re asking yourself how do I earn more points during the holiday season so I can travel like Armand & Annette?
Reply here with questions!
Thanks for reading, please share this with someone who needs a points 101. If you’re just getting started, check out the mini-course at allwaysaway.com
Editorial Disclosure
Opinions expressed here are the author's alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, hotel, airline, or other entity. This content has not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of the entities included within the post. The content on this page is accurate as of the posting date; however, some of our partner offers may have expired.