I spent this past weekend enjoying an unofficial second “babymoon” at the Hyatt Regency Clearwater Beach Resort & had a fantastic time relaxing and reliving some childhood memories (every summer as a child and into my teen years we visited Clearwater, Florida). As a habit of mine I always like to see the points I’ve earned from a particular stay or flight so a few days after any flight or hotel stay, I use AwardWallet to check my updated balances in the particular program(s). I do this even for award nights at hotels as I usually earn points for any incidental spending at the hotel.

Hyatt Regency Clearwater Beach Resort

Generally I have a rough idea of how many points I should earn from any trip and in this case I used a points + cash award (combined with a DSU which was further upgraded to a two bedroom Gulf Oceanfront Suite – review coming) so I had a base cost of $125/night + my incidental spending at the hotel for meals/activities. As a Diamond member, I earn 5 points per dollar spent + a 30% bonus and I had selected the 1,000 Hyatt points as my Diamond amenity so I was easily expecting to earn in excess of 5,000 points for my stay. Well, when I refreshed my Hyatt Gold Passport balance via AwardWallet my balance was actually lower than before! Logging into my Hyatt account, I found the culprit.

The puzzling piece of incorrect activity

My first thought was that my account was hacked and someone redeemed my points for “Shor 21” whatever that is. Upon thinking it about some more however, Shor is the name of the restaurant at the Hyatt Regency Cleawarwater and we did have dinner there on 5/14 so maybe there was mixup where the hotel believed I wanted to use points to pay for dinner. Now redeeming points for food is an option per the Hyatt website but it is an absolutely terrible value as per the rewards chart, the 10,000 points only covered $50 of food. I double checked my checkout receipt and my dinner was charged in full to the room so my guess now was the hotel double charged me for dinner – by charging me the full cash price and 10,000 points.

Please do not ever use this

I called the Diamond line and a helpful agent stated that activity related to a redemption for food at Shor which I explained was incorrect as my checkout receipt shows it being charged to the room. After conferring with her supervisor she opened an investigation, gave me the Case ID and assured me within a few days the points will be back in my account. I don’t need the points right away so this works for me but this incident underscores one very important lesson – always check your frequent flyer and hotel loyalty accounts after each flight or stay to make sure everything looks accurate. I’ve posted before how Hyatt has made mistakes in not awarding the correct amount of points so this can and does happen more than you think. I highly recommend using a tool like AwardWallet (it’s what I use) so you can check all your account balances in one shot instead of individually logging into each account.

Disclosure: Yes, that’s my referral link for AwardWallet but all I earn are free upgrade coupons which historically I have given away to readers or clients. I do not earn any money from you signing up for AwardWallet via my link.