(EXPIRED) How To Save 18.1% On Hyatt Gift Cards (BoA Cash Rewards With Targeted Offer Required)

Hyatt launched a deal for Black Friday offering 10% off their gift cards. This deal ended yesterday, but it’s returning for four days from December 20-23, so I thought I’d give you a heads up about a way you can save a total of 18.1% on their gift cards.

This will likely be a fairly niche opportunity as it requires that you have the Bank of America Cash Rewards card and were targeted for a bonus 6% on it. If you have both of these though, here’s how it works.

That targeted offer gives you a bonus 6% in the online shopping category. The Cash Rewards card also allows you to choose your 3% category, with one of the options being online shopping. That means if you choose online shopping as your 3% category, you’ll earn a total of 9% cashback on online shopping purchases. That’s good on up to $2,500 of spend (i.e. $150 bonus cashback) before the end of 2019.

At the time I suggested this would be a good option for gift card purchases on Amazon and Raise, but the new Hyatt gift card deal offered a potentially great opportunity too. Online Hyatt gift card purchases are processed by Buyatab, so if those purchases coded as online shopping, you’d earn 9% cashback in addition to saving 10%.

The risk here was that there was no way of knowing for sure that it would code as online shopping. I used AwardWallet’s merchant category lookup tool, but it wasn’t entirely clear what the result would be:

As you can see, when searching for Buyatab it listed three options. Two of them appear to code as Merchandise, with the third coding as Business Services – Conferences & Training. That didn’t fill me with hope, but the first listing gave a tiny glimmer of it seeing as it was listed as ‘ONLINE E GIFT BUYATAB’.

I decided to give it a try on Black Friday, figuring that at worst I’d be saving 10%. I bought a $1,000 Hyatt gift card for $900 and this is how the rewards are being displayed in my account:

As you can see from the category bonus listing, it coded as an online shopping purchase. As a result, I earned $27 cashback on the $900 purchase which is 3%. That’s the standard online shopping bonus rate, so I expect to see the additional 6% cashback from the targeted offer hit my account in the future as that’s not due to post until up to three months after the offer ends.

That 6% cashback will be worth $54, meaning I’ll have earned a total of $81 cashback on the $900 purchase. Taking into account the original 10% discount from Hyatt, I’ll have saved 18.1% which is great for Hyatt gift cards since they rarely go on sale unless you pick some up at a Hyatt property when there’s an Amex or Chase Offer.

As I mentioned above, the 10% discount on Hyatt gift cards returns in 2.5 weeks, so there’s still time to take advantage of this discount if you have the targeted BoA Cash Rewards offer too.