TravelingForMiles.com may receive commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on TravelingForMiles.com are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. TravelingForMiles.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers.
Some links to products and travel providers on this website will earn Traveling For Miles a commission which helps contribute to the running of the site – I’m very grateful to anyone who uses these links but their use is entirely optional. The compensation does not impact how and where products appear on this site and does not impact reviews that are published.
As great as Hyatt is (and I’m definitely a fan) one of the biggest drawbacks of being a Hyatt loyalist is that the corporation’s footprint is comparatively small. Unless you’re very lucky indeed you generally need to have a backup hotel chain to turn to when visiting locations where Hyatt has no presence at all…and that can make maintaining Hyatt Diamond status quite hard (as I’ve found this year).
Hyatt has recently announced that it plans to expand its presence in Seattle by adding a Hyatt Regency to the city but, as great as it always is to have more Hyatt options, it would have been nicer had the option been somewhere where us Hyatt fans aren’t already reasonably well served.
Hyatt Regency Seattle
The Hyatt regency Seattle is scheduled to open in “mid-2018” and will be located in the city’s Denny Triangle neighborhood.
The Hyatt Regency Seattle is planned to be the largest hotel in the Pacific Northwest with over 1,250 guest rooms, 100,000 sqft of meeting/event space and what Hyatt is calling “an expansive Regency Club Lounge”.
David Tarr, Hyatt’s senior VP of real estate and development, had this to say:
Developing a Hyatt Regency hotel in downtown Seattle is consistent with our company’s objective to grow strategically in gateway destinations where our guests want us to be
But is that actually true? Do Hyatt’s guests really want another Hyatt in Seattle?
Hyatt already has 4 properties in the centre of Seattle:
- Grand Hyatt Seattle
- Hyatt at Olive 8
- Hyatt Place Seattle Downtown
- Hyatt House Seattle Downtown
And, if you take a look a the location of the new Hyatt Regency Seattle (red marker) with reference to other Hyatts in the immediate vicinity…..
….it’s not as if Hyatt guests are getting that much more of an option. The Grand Hyatt is 5 minutes walk away from where the new property will be sited and the Hyatt at Olive 8 is on the next block.
I’m sure Hyatt has perfectly sound financial reasons for wanting to open a huge hotel in the centre of Seattle but I’m also pretty sure it’s not because that’s what Hyatt guests want…most of us want more Hyatts in new locations.
Bottom Line
I’d like to end on a positive note so I’ll say that it’s always nice to have a brand new hotel as an option and a hotel as big as the Hyatt Regency is only going to make awards easier to come by.
It will be interesting to see which Hyatt category the new property will fall into as the Grand Hyatt (rated 6th best hotel in Seattle by TripAdvisor) is only a Cat. 4 property (costing 15,000 points/night) so I don’t expect this new property to be higher than that…although Hyatt may surprise us.
Featured image courtesy of Jerry Meaden via Flickr
