A couple weeks ago I was heading to the Baltimore area to check out some of the graduate schools I had been admitted to out that way. I had been planning on booking a one-night stay using Hotel Tonight, but at 9am I looked at the hotels they had posted and none of the locations/prices worked for me. I checked the rates for some of the hotels I have stayed at before, and those were all pretty high too. Instead, I decided to experiment with Priceline’s Name Your Own Price feature again. I ended up locking in the Hyatt Regency Baltimore for less than $90, including taxes, so I was pretty happy with that.

Now, since I have the Hyatt Credit Card, I have Platinum Status with Hyatt, and while that doesn’t get you much, I was hoping to cash in on the 2pm late check-out (although, it turned out that I didn’t need it anyway). There is no easy way to add your hotel loyalty number to an OTA reservation, but I contacted Hyatt’s Twitter Team and asked them to add it for me. They did, no problem.

It was a nice surprise when I logged into my Hyatt account a few days later and saw that some points had even posted from the stay.

Surprise! My points posted!

Lesson: Add your hotel loyalty number even when making a reservation through an OTA.