We are just about 6 months away from the 2014 Boston Marathon. The time has started for looking at beginning your training program soon (for those who are following 24 week programs) and for the rest of you who work with 18/16 week programs, you are getting antsy about wanting to start! Here is something you can do with your time – start planing your Boston Marathon trip! Here is a post focused on Hyatt hotels in the Boston area that would serve you well in your Boston trip. Time to get ready!
Start Planning Your Boston Marathon Trip
Hyatt Hotels in Boston
Hyatt Regency Boston
- One Avenue de Lafayette, Boston, MA
- This is a 4-star hotel
- It is located 1.5 miles away from the Convention Center
- The cost is $249 + tax per night
- It is a category 4 so requires 15,000 Gold Passport Points for a free night
- Trip Advisor reviews
- Hotel website
- Point value – 1.6 cents per point
Hyatt Regency hotels are pretty dependable hotels. They are often made for the business traveler so have convenience, good amenities, decent workout areas, and anything else that one would look for in a good business hotel. This hotel is close enough to the marathon finish but not so close that you will get caught in the congestion after the race. The biggest problem I have with this hotel is the cash price vs the points required. While I do not want to pay $250 for a hotel per night, I would have a hard time using 15,000 Hyatt points for that. That puts them at a low 1.6 cents per point value which is below what I would consider them worth. The good part is that it is a category 4 – that means you can use your anniversary night certificate for your stay of one night here (more on that at the bottom).
Hyatt Regency Cambridge
- 575 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA
- This is a 4-star hotel
- It is located 1.4 miles away from the Convention Center
- The cost is $179 + tax per night
- It is a category 3 so requires 12,000 Gold Passport Points for a free night
- Trip Advisor reviews
- Hotel website
- Point value – 1.5 cents per point
Again, the Hyatt Regency brand is pretty dependable. However, for some reason, this hotel is ranked 15 of 17 hotels in Cambridge on Trip Advisor. It looks like a wonderful hotel and is nicely situated just across the Charles River from Boston, but it apparently had not lived up to the expectations of many travelers. If you are looking for a cheaper hotel to book with cash for the marathon, this may be it. While I wouldn’t count this as being “cheap”, $179 is certainly on the lower end for a Hyatt in a major city. With the points being worth only 1.5 cents per point at this price, I would not want to use points. In fact, I would rather not even use my anniversary certificate here either. There are many hotels that would provide a better value to the certificate than this.
Getting Your Gold Passport Points
That’s really it for the Hyatt option! There are other hotels in the area but they are greater than 8 miles away from that point so I chose not to include them in this overview. You can see that Hyatt is not the best hotel chain to give you the greatest of options in Boston. In fact, SPG presents a lot more (and better) options for Boston and you can check them all out here in my overview of SPG hotels for Boston.
However, should you desire to stay at a Hyatt while in town for the Boston Marathon, how would you go about accruing points that you can use to redeem at these hotels? Fortunately, there are quite a few ways to do so.
Hyatt Credit Card from Chase
The Hyatt Chase credit card gives you 2 free nights after spending $1,000 in the first 3 months of having the card. Unlike most other hotel branded credit cards, these are outright free nights and not points. This means that you can use these two nights at any category hotel. Since Hyatt has six categories, I consider it not that great of a deal to use these free nights on either of these two hotels (one of them is a category 4 and the other is a category 3). That being said, they are your free nights – if you decide that is how you want to spend them, who am I to tell you not to? 🙂
Hyatt Chase Credit Card – 2 Free Nights after spending $1,000 in the first 3 months – Application Link (I do not receive a commission for this card)
Hyatt Chase Anniversary Night
With the Hyatt Chase credit card above, you will receive a free night at a category 1-4 after your annual fee each year. This works great when a hotel costs more than $100 and is a category 4 or less. You can use this for either hotel above.
Ultimate Reward Points
Ultimate Reward points transfer at a ratio of 1:1 to the Hyatt Gold Passport program. This opens up many other ways to earn the points necessary to stay at Hyatt hotels. There are three cards that will give you those Ultimate Reward points.
Chase Sapphire Preferred Card – 40,000 Points after $3,000 in 3 months – application link (I do not receive a commission for this link
Chase Ink Bold Card – 50,000 Points after $5,000 in 3 months – application link (I do not receive a commission for this link)
Chase Ink Plus Card – 50,000 Points after $5,000 in 3 months – application link (I do not receive a commission for this link)
With just the cards above, you would have enough points to convert to 140,000 Hyatt Gold Passport points (not that I am suggesting that!). That would get you many, many free nights!
Summary
As you can see, there are just a couple of options for Hyatt for the Boston Marathon. I would rather save my Hyatt points and stay at a different chain of hotels there. However, I know that there are some that may prefer to stay at Hyatt hotels (maybe they like them over others, maybe they have used these hotels before, maybe they have Hyatt Diamond status, maybe they have an overabundance of Hyatt points, etc). If you are one of them, now you know which ones you are looking at!
