Nashville is the hometown of country music, and it’s also well-known for its love of honky-tonk and bluegrass.

Among the many bars, breweries and cowboy hat shops is a scattering of name-brand hotels. I recently stayed at one of these, the Grand Hyatt Nashville, and it was better than I expected.

Here's what you should know.

Booking

As a Hyatt hotel, I had a couple of different options when it came to booking. The Grand Hyatt Nashville is a Category 5 hotel, which means it would have cost me a total of 60,000 points if I wanted to redeem them for my three-night stay.

NerdWallet values World of Hyatt points at 2.3 cents each, which means I would have needed to redeem $1,680 worth of points for this stay.

Instead, I chose to pay cash. I’m registered with Hyatt Leverage, a program aimed at small business owners that grants them discounts on bookings.

As a result, I was able to book the three nights at a rate of $296 per night. After taxes and fees, this came to a total of about $344 per night and $1,033 overall.

I’m happy I chose to pay cash. I earned 5,785 World of Hyatt points for my stay, which is worth $161.98.

Location

Nashville is a fairly large city, with a population of nearly 700,000 people. You wouldn’t think so — especially as a tourist — since most of the action takes place along Broadway, a walkable thoroughfare rife with restaurants, bars, music and breweries.

The Grand Hyatt Nashville is excellently located on Broadway itself, though just removed from the heart of the action. This meant that I was able to walk a few minutes to reach everything, but I wasn’t forced to suffer through loud music late into the night.

Accommodation

I was planning this trip as part of a birthday celebration with a friend, which meant I wanted our room to be special.

I have Globalist elite status with Hyatt thanks to a copious number of Las Vegas stays, which means I earned four suite upgrade awards for this year.

Although my stay was only three nights, I used one of these upgrades to ensure that we had a suite during our stay.