Hyatt previously rolled out the Pay My Way feature, which lets you use different payment methods for different nights within a single reservation. You can combine cash, points, and free night awards. However, free night awards used to be applied automatically based on whichever one expired soonest, and you couldn’t choose manually.
One downside was that if you had both a Cat 1-4 and a Cat 1-7 free night award, and the Cat 7 award expired sooner, the system would force that one to be used first. That’s pretty wasteful if you’re booking a Cat 1-4 hotel. Hyatt recently added the ability to choose, so now you can specify which free night award to use.
This Pay My Way feature is actually quite useful, since it lets you complete a multi-night reservation all at once. With IHG, for example, you often have to book each night separately and then call customer service afterward to request staying in the same room, which adds extra steps and is pretty inconvenient.
