Hotel Review: Hyatt Regency Suites Atlanta is a great value for the points

The PFD clan recently had our first vacation in a while, and we elected to spend it in Atlanta. We really didn’t care too much where we spent our vacation just so long as we got away from home for a week. Why Atlanta? Here was our reasoning:

• It’s only about a four-hour drive.
• There’s enough to see and do there to keep us busy.
• We could economically and comfortably shelter eight people for a week there.

The eight people consisted of me, the wife, and the four kids plus a mother-in-law and an aunt-in-law (I’m blessed to have very nice in-laws who are also great babysitters). And what tipped the balance in favor of Atlanta was the Hyatt Regency Suites Atlanta Northwest. Two great things about the hotel from a family perspective: all the rooms are suites, and it’s a Category 1 hotel, so it’s a mere 5,000 points per night per suite.

This hotel is one of a very few Hyatt Regencys in Category 1, which is dominated by Hyatt Places. After staying there, I’m still not sure why it’s a Category 1, unless it’s because it was recently renovated and they haven’t bothered to switch its category yet. The hotel ended up being absolutely perfect for our needs, primarily because the rooms were huge, and they really were suites. Not the SpringHill Suites type of thing where they stick a half-wall in the middle of a regular-sized hotel room and call it a “suite” but real, live, actual suites. Take a look at our room:

That’s actually a picture from the Hyatt website, but that’s what our room looked like. We rented two of these for six nights. So for just 60,000 UR points, we got four rooms worth of lodging and not once during our stay did I feel cramped, which is amazing given that we had eight people. The rooms were great for the kids, as the sofa cushions made for great forts:

Physically, the hotel was nice. As I said, it was recently renovated so everything is in pretty good shape. The staff was helpful and friendly. I really liked the pool area, as seen from one of our rooms:

See that one circular table on the left side by the waterfalls? A bottle of wine, a warm summer evening, and that table (plus in-laws babysitting the kids) make for a great date.

The hotel’s about 25 minutes from downtown Atlanta in good traffic. “Good traffic” doesn’t happen too frequently in Atlanta, but fortunately there wasn’t a lot of bad traffic either and I’m happy trading off a little more driving for extremely spacious accommodations.

So if you need a lot of space in a reasonably nice building and you don’t want to blow a lot of points, this hotel is a great option. During our stay online rates were around $160, or $180-something after taxes, which means we got between three and four cents per point out of our URs.

These suites were somewhere around 650 square feet, which is bigger than my first apartment. I’m curious: what’s the highest square foot per point ratio you can achieve from any hotel in any loyalty program? I don’t know nearly enough to even begin to guess at the answer, but I’m sure this hotel would compare favorably to most.