Last month, we spent 6 nights at the Park Hyatt Maldives for our second anniversary and loved every minute of it…minus getting there. Even though we were on an award stay, in which we would earn no points for the room, we still racked up a fair amount of charges billed to our room for upgrade fees, meals, massages etc., so I expected to earn a fair amount of points for those charges. I finally got around to reconciling the points earned back to the hotel bill after our trip and I noticed a huge discrepancy – I was short by over 11,000 points!

Since we decided to splurge and upgrade to a pool villa on 3 nights ($205 + tax upgrade fee a night) and an overwater villa ($405 + tax upgrade fee a night) on the other 3 nights, our bill at checkout was in excess of $3,000. However Hyatt thought my eligible spend for the 6 nights was only $1,255,50 as seen in a copy of my bill above (for the record, the redemption eligible amount was also wrong but less important). This amounted to only 6,275 points earned for the stay which was way short.

I admittedly didn’t know whether to contact the hotel or Hyatt Gold Passport to fix the issue so I started off by emailing (or rather I emailed for my wife since this award was booked out of her account) Hyatt Gold Passport at goldpassport@hyatt.com and explaining the issue. A nice representative promised to investigate and get back to me within 3 days. I proceeded to attach a copy of my hotel bill and the amount of points I expected for the stay for all the incidentals. After a day or so, she replied to me and cc’d the main reservations email for the Park Hyatt Maldives asking them to post the points to my account. Several more days passed without any contact until I received the following email.

Sure enough, I now saw the correct amount of points in my Hyatt Gold Passport account for our stay and it was a pretty painless process to get it fixed.

This is the second time I’ve encountered the issue above (with the other being much smaller so not as big a deal) and I am sharing this as a reminder to all to double check the points that post to your account after a stay. In this case, it was a big difference as the extra 11,536 points is almost equivalent to a free night at a Category 3 Hyatt hotel, which goes for 12,000 points a night. This advice holds true not just for Hyatt stays but also other hotels and even flights too so please remember to take a look at your points/miles balances after any stay or flight!