When I got into this game, I didn’t understand the effusive love for Hyatt. As I traveled more, I came to understand why award travel enthusiasts love Hyatt so much — and Hyatt stole my heart, too. But over the past few years, Hyatt has been on a bit of a tear. The latest partnership with Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a blow that seemed disappointing enough in a vacuum, but when considered along with the many other hits to the program over the past several years, I wonder if it isn’t time for the love affair with Hyatt to cool if not end. At the very least, this latest blow made me step back and realize the scale of the changes we have seen over the past six years.
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There’s still plenty to love about Hyatt
At the outset, I should state the obvious: there is still a lot to love about Hyatt. Top-tier Globalist benefits are generally well-executed, particularly at the higher end properties (and more so abroad than domestically). Hyatt has numerous strengths that I do love, including:
- Best-in-class top tier status benefits (you know you’ll get breakfast / lounge, free parking on award stays, meaningful upgrades, etc).
- Best milestone rewards (confirmable suite upgrades, valuable free night certificates)
- Generally above average service (which isn’t to say perfect, but on the whole generally better than the competition)
- Nice, well-run hotels in general. Good coverage in major metro areas in the US (not great coverage, but good coverage)
- Excellent Regency / Grand Hyatt / Park Hyatt properties in Asia
- Ability for top-tier Globalists to share benefits with Guest of Honor bookings
- Ability to supplement elite earning with credit card spend
- Generally very good value for points for properties that adhere to an award chart
Hyatt still has an award chart (or rather a few of them). That helps us know what to expect in determining how many points we will need for an important redemption. It also provides plenty of opportunity to get very good value out of points. I appreciate that.
As indicated by the list above, there are numerous things I like about the Hyatt program, but we’ve written about the things we love plenty of times before. Rather, the latest changes (with the launch of Mr. & Mrs. Smith) force me to take a look back at where we’ve been over these past couple of years.
Hyatt’s cumulative changes have hurt
It is hard to let go of the disappointment I felt in how Hyatt has launched its partnership with Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Sure, Mr. & Mrs. Smith probably has some really nice hotels around the world. The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of really nice hotels in the world, but most of them are irrelevant to me; I care most about the ones where I can get outsized value with my points. After all, if my points are only worth around 1c each, I might as well just use my pennies and then I can shop around and select whatever luxury hotel I want with no need to care much about booking through Hyatt (particularly true for luxury hotels where I get no Globalist benefits). That was a massive change from the partnership with Small Luxury Hotels of the World, where I enjoyed incredible stays and good benefits and outsized value for my points.
Thinking about my disappointment and the huge shrinkage of the Hyatt footprint (since I find Mr. & Mrs. Smith largely irrelevant to me given the lack of ability to get either outsized value for my points or outsized loyalty benefits) made me think of the multitude of other ways in which Hyatt’s program has taken one blow after another over the past several years:
- In 2018, Hyatt created a new award chart category (Category 8) that was “only for SLH properties” in the beginning. I said in early 2019 that it wouldn’t be long until flagship Hyatt properties moved up to Category 8.
- One year later, in 2019, other Hyatt properties began creeping into Category 8.
- Next, in 2020, Hyatt intended to introduce peak and off-peak pricing, though the pandemic ultimately pushed that back until 2021. Awards at peak-priced Category 8 hotels began costing 50% more than they had in 2019 at the top Hyatt-branded properties in the world.
- In 2022, Hyatt created a separate, more expensive award chart for all-inclusive properties. At the top end of the chart, a peak-priced all-inclusive property began to cost 58,000 points, which is just short of double the former award rate of a top-tier Category 7 property like the Park Hyatt Tokyo or New York in 2019 (which was 30,000 points per night) and nearly triple the cost of popular all-inclusive properties just a couple of years prior.
- In 2023, Hyatt added Homes & Hideaways, which gave us the opportunity to book vacation homes with points. Unfortunately, these are dynamically priced and a poor value using points.
- Also in 2023, Hyatt ended its long-standing partnership with MGM Hotels and resorts, ending the ability to pick up inexpensive elite night credits while visiting Las Vegas. This was also a bummer in the other direction as it ended the ability to match high-tier Hyatt status to get MGM Gold status, which waived resort fees at the many MGM properties in Las Vegas.
- In early 2024, Hyatt moved some “Hyatt Destination Residences” properties to Homes & Hideaways, effectively tanking the value proposition of booking those properties with points.
- Also in early 2024, we found out that Hyatt would be losing its partnership with Small Luxury Hotels of the World (SLH). Unfortunately, Hyatt traded out SLH (which had some stunningly wonderful properties like the Grand Hotel Victoria, which at times costs $1,500 per night or more in-season, that fit within Hyatt’s award chart and provided set benefits for all Hyatt members) for Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which no doubt has some wonderful hotels but which are not subject to any award chart and thus feature dynamic pricing. Further, there are no guaranteed benefits for Hyatt members, elite or otherwise, apart from the ability to earn elite night credit and points on room rate.
- Assuming you don’t want to use points at poor value for Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the side effect of the loss of SLH is that Hyatt has now lost wide swaths of coverage, particularly in Europe.
To be fair, the hotel landscape has changed drastically over the past six years, with cash rates similarly rising significantly and the other effects of inflation no doubt taking their toll. And the everlasting wisdom of the Sunscreen Song long ago taught me that “prices will rise” is an inalienable truth which I must accept.
In years past, we were forced to accept that fact of life (that prices will rise) one time every year in March when Hyatt introduced category changes. However, the above changes are each beyond and in addition to those annual adjustments of hotels upward or downward in award pricing. Cumulatively, they represent a larger shift in the value proposition than the traditional award category changes.
The unfortunate result is a relatively significant shift in the way I look at Hyatt if not the cent-per-point value of its award currency. It used to be very simple to explain Hyatt’s value proposition to a newcomer: collect Hyatt points, get great value when using them toward Hyatt hotels. Today, there are far more qualifiers and explainers necessary to add to that sentence.
I’m sure that Hyatt has a large segment of business travel members whose main concern with points is getting a free vacation annually to show for all the time they spent away from home on work trips. I understand that many people don’t crunch the numbers to know whether they are getting 1.2c per point or 2.1c per point and that many would look at a difference of nine-tenths of a penny and think it doesn’t really matter either way. But for award travel enthusiasts who make decisions about how to collect points and which points to collect by comparison, those fractions of a penny make a big difference. The bottom line is that the math appears as though it is not going to work out for using Hyatt points for Mr. & Mrs. Smith and that math has also made it increasingly difficult to swallow the other changes above as well.
We haven’t seen a dip in the value of points toward Hyatt hotels on the whole. In fact, with skyrocketing hotel rates in many markets, points may have become even more valuable by some measure over these past few years. But the way I look at the program has changed. No longer is it the slam-dunk home-run to get great value for your points — you have to bust out the calculator to know, particularly in the all-inclusive and boutique sectors.
Bottom line
Hyatt hasn’t chased me away from the program by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I have a whole bunch of Hyatt stays on the books for 2024. And as long as its elite program continues to be head and shoulders above the competition and it remains possible to get excellent value out of the points for Hyatt’s own properties, I’m sure I’ll continue to collect and use Hyatt points well intro the future. Indeed, World of Hyatt points have maintained strong value overall despite the numerous changes noted above.
On the flip side, I have all but lost interest entirely in Hyatt’s all-inclusive, vacation rental, and now boutique luxury booking options as the value per point in those realms has dipped significantly over time. That’s disappointing in large part because Hyatt drove my initial taste for all-inclusive and boutique luxury properties. I may not have spent the money on those types of hotels and resorts were it not for Hyatt’s solid value for points enlightening me through experience. It is a shame that I have become far less likely to book those types of experiences through Hyatt.
As the value per point of those redemptions creeps closer to (or in some cases below) 1 cent each, it is increasingly likely that I’ll look elsewhere when I need all-inclusive or luxury boutique hotel bookings. Indeed, I’ve already begun a shift toward earning more cash back (via welcome bonuses on the US Bank Business Leverage and Business Altitude Connect cards and everyday spend on the Altitude Reserve) to use toward paid hotels. Given my escape from the confines of Hyatt’s currency when I am m instead inclined to use cash, it is far from a lock that I’ll be booking those experiences at or through Hyatt. I’ll certainly still get excited about a good Grand Hyatt or Park Hyatt stay now and again, but Hyatt is slowly pushing me toward other options for other types of stays rather than drawing me in.
The post Hyatt’s cumulative changes hurt more in retrospect (on Nick’s mind) appeared first on Frequent Miler.