Stay in Hawaii with Points: 3 Best Hyatt Hotels for Families

Aloha! If you are looking to take your family to Hawaii with points, you’re in the right place! After you’ve figured out how to use your points to fly to Hawaii, it’s time to figure out where to stay. 

If you’ve looked at hotel prices and felt like a nice place to stay is out of reach, you’re not alone. We get a lot of questions about Hawaii with points. Fortunately, there are some fabulous family hotels on the islands that you can book with your credit card bonus.

Our favorite family hotels in Hawaii with points are all Hyatt hotels. Not only do they offer great value for your points, but they all come with wonderful family amenities and, when booked with points, your resort fee is waived. 

Top Family Hyatt Hotels in Hawaii

Oahu: Hyatt Place Waikiki Beach

The Hyatt Place Waikiki is the place to be if you want to be in the middle of Waikiki. As a Category 3 Hyatt, you can use Hyatt points to book your room for just 12,000 points per night.

While not directly on the beach, the Hyatt Place is just a few minutes walk from the beach, the Honolulu Zoo, the Ala Wai Golf Course, and an abundance of restaurants. 

The Hyatt Place Waikiki has a pool and fitness center and the amenity fee (which is waived if you book with points!) includes beach chairs, boogie boards and lei making classes. Check out a full list of their amenities here. 

In addition to a great location and amenities, this hotel is an excellent choice for large families because rooms with two queen beds sleep six. All rooms include a sofa bed and breakfast is also included.

It’s also down the street from one of my favorite places to eat in Honolulu – Marugame Udon. This fast casual restaurant serves up huge bowls of noodles at a great price for Waikiki. The line is usually out the door, but it moves quickly and your whole family will love it. You can even watch them make the noodles while you wait. 

Maui: Hyatt Regency Maui Resort and Spa

If you are looking for a resort, your family will love the Hyatt Regency Maui Resort and Spa. The Hyatt Regency Maui is a Category 6 Hyatt with cash prices that typically exceed $700 a night. Booking on points offers an incredible value starting at 21k points per night.

Located on Ka’anapali Beach, this Hyatt Regency has so much to offer you won’t ever want to leave the resort. Included amenities include 6 pools, fitness classes, shuttle service in Ka’anapali, and beach chairs. Your kids will also love the onsite penguins, parrots, and flamingos!

The resort fee also includes a variety of cultural classes, including lei making, hula and ukulele lessons, kukui nut bracelet making, fire knife demos and more! For a full schedule, check here. Again, when you book with points your resort fee and taxes are all waived.

If you truly don’t want to leave the resort, the Hyatt Regency Maui also has 10 on-site restaurants and a nightly luau. 

You may be able to use your points to upgrade to a club room and you’ll get access to the Regency Club and complimentary food and beverages per day. If you’ve got the points this is worth considering since resort food is notoriously expensive and underappreciated by kids. 

Grand Hyatt Kauai Resort & Spa

If I haven’t made your decision on where to stay hard enough already, the Grand Hyatt Kauai is another great option for families in Hawaii. Cash rates exceed $600 per night, but points offer a great value starting at 21k Hyatt points per night for this Category 6 hotel.

Like the Hyatt Regency Maui, the Grand Hyatt is a true resort. It boasts beautiful rooms, a beachfront location, fitness classes, and on site restaurants. The kids will love floating past waterfalls in the lazy river pool and swooshing down their 150 foot waterslide. The Grand Hyatt Kauai has its own Hawaiian Cultural Center where they offer a variety of cultural classes for kids and adults alike.

Why Book with Hyatt?

Why do we love booking Hyatt hotels in Hawaii with points so much?

No resort fees when you book with points

When you book pretty much any hotel in a touristy location in Hawaii, you will have to pay a resort/destination fee. These typically exceed $30 per night. When you book your hotel on points at any Hyatt, the resort fee is waived so your Hyatt booking on points is truly free.

Great amenities

Beautiful beaches, pools, water slides, cultural classes, fitness classes. Each of these three resorts offers great family amenities! The resort properties are going to get you more amenities, but they’re also going to cost you more.

Hyatt quality

Booking hotels on a budget can be iffy. The pictures may look good, but when you get there the furniture is over worn, there is hair in the shower, and the room smells mildewy. We don’t think you’ll find this to be the case with any of these Hyatt properties! And the best part is you’re getting great quality for FREE with points.

Availability

Unlike other hotel chains, there is not a cap on the number of award rooms available with Hyatt. Their policy is that “World of Hyatt Standard-Room Free Night Awards are available when hotels have standard rooms available at the Standard Rate.” So if there are standard rooms available for your dates, you will be able to book those rooms with points.

Great value

We are always looking to maximize value with our points. You could go through the Chase or Capital One portal and book with points or “erase” your spending, but the real value here is booking directly through Hyatt.

Here’s a screenshot of the number of points to book the Hyatt Regency Maui through Chase’s portal with the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card. You’ll get a value of 1.25 cents per point and one night would cost 62,996 points.

Here’s the same booking using your points directly through Hyatt – at 25k points your points are worth 3.15 cents per point! You can use those same Chase Ultimate Rewards points but get more value just by transferring them over to Hyatt before booking.

How to Use the Rate Calendar To Find Cheap Dates

Hyatt award redemptions follow a straightforward dynamic pricing model. The rates vary throughout the year, but they follow a set pricing model based on demand.

How do you know what the rate is when you want to go though? It can be tedious to plug in dates searching for those off-peak days. Fortunately, Hyatt has an easy way to find out these dates for each hotel.

After you’ve selected a hotel you will go to “Book Now”. You’ll see the date and occupancy search option and you can leave it at the default and click “Book Now” again. You want to get the reservations page, where you will see the option to see the “Points Calendar”. This will only show at the website, you cannot view this Calendar on the app.

Now you’ll see a scrollable calendar by month that shows the points per night for that specific Hyatt property. Note that this does not mean the rooms are available.

For a step by step on how to do this, check out Katie’s Instagram post on using the Hyatt calendar to find the cheapest rates.

How to Find Availability

Hyatt website

Hyatt releases rooms 395 days in advance. You can check availability for your dates by plugging them into the Hyatt search bar directly from Hyatt.com or from your preferred property and selecting “use points”.

You may get the message “Unfortunately, this hotel is not accepting World of Hyatt points or award during those dates. Explore our other rates or modify your search.”

There are a few reasons you may get this message. It could be:

• There are no standard rooms available,
• Your desired occupancy is too high
• Your stay is too short (some properties have a minimum length of stay for award bookings).

Try changing your occupancy down to 2 and switching from “view points” to “view rates” to see if there are still no standard rooms available. If there are still no standard rooms available then they are sold out.

If there are standard rooms available to book with cash, give Hyatt a call and remind them of their award booking policy and see what they can do to help.

Max My Point

While the Hyatt website does not have a calendar view option that will show you award availability, there are some other sites that can make finding award availability easier.

Max My Point tracks availability of award nights at Hilton, Marriott, and Hyatt. You can search for your desired hotel and see a calendar view showing what nights are available to book with points as well as rate information.

Start by searching for your desired hotel. Find the dates you want to travel. If there is availability, you will see the award rate and lowest cash rate. If you click on an available date, Max My Point will take you directly to Hyatt’s site for booking.

If there is no availability, you can click the bell icon to set an alert. Set your parameters and you will be notified if something becomes available.

Stay With Points

Stay With Points has similar functionality as Max My Point. It pulls award availability information from Hyatt, Hilton, and Marriott. As with Max My Point, you can search your desired hotel, see award night availability, and set alerts.

How to Get Hyatt Points

Of course, our favorite way to get Hyatt points is a good credit card bonus!

Chase Sapphire Credit Cards

Both the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card and Chase Sapphire Reserve® Card earn Chase Ultimate Rewards® that can be transferred to Hyatt. The Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card is one of our favorite starter cards and you can read our complete guide on the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card.

The standard bonus on both these cards is 60,000 points, which could get you 5 nights at the Hyatt Place Waikiki! If a husband and wife both get these cards (and one refers the other for an extra bonus) — you will have 143,000 points after completing your spending — enough for 6 nights at the Hyatt Regency in Maui which typically would cost $4200!

Chase Freedom Cards

If you already have a Chase Sapphire card, Chase Freedom cards offer a great way to keep earning Ultimate Rewards. The earning rates are actually better than with the Sapphire.

Officially these cards earn Chase Ultimate Rewards® that can only be redeemed cash back (and not transferred to partners like Hyatt) but if you also hold a Sapphire card, you can combine move your points from your Freedom card over to your Sapphire and they become transferrable to Hyatt. If you earn $200 on a Freedom, that will be 20,000 Ultimate Rewards points.

Chase Ink Business Credit Cards

If you have a business or a side hustle, and are able to meet the minimum spend requirements, the Chase Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card and Chase Ink Business Cash® Credit Card each offer a welcome bonus with NO annual fee. These offer a great opportunity to build your points balance.

The catch is, unless you have a Sapphire card or the Chase Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card, points from the Business Unlimited and the Business Cash card cannot be transferred to transfer partners.

World of Hyatt Credit Cards

World of Hyatt offers both a personal and business card. These cards offer up to 60,000 bonus points. The spend to get the full bonuses is quite a bit higher than a Chase Sapphire so we recommend you look at a Chase Sapphire first. The World of Hyatt personal card offers a free night (At a Category 1-4 hotel) every year on account anniversary and this can be used at the Hyatt Place Waikiki.