Frequent Miler on the Air - 12 things to know about Hyatt's devaluation | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep365 | 7-3-26

Episode Date: July 3, 2026

On today's episode, we'll see how the 5x airline card saga continues, Nick will give us more reasons to use the Southwest app, we'll hear some exciting news about Frontier, and we'll dive deep into Hyatt's devaluation.Giant Mailbag(01:06) - More comments about our comments about there being "No airline cards offer 5x or more"Crazy Thing: Chase(03:41) - Points Boost is sometimes different between Chase Sapphire Reserve® Card & Sapphire Reserve for Business℠ CardBonvoyed(07:22) - Lifemiles+ eliminates free cancellation benefit for new subscribersAwards, Points, and More(11:35) - Alaska Wallet funds can now be used for AS companion fares again(12:20) - Rove adds Frontier as a transfer partnerRead more about Frontier being added as a Rove transfer partner here(15:30) - Nick's Southwest notesMain Event: 12 things to know about Hyatt's devaluation(21:18) - Hyatt recently introduced new award charts. We dug into the numbers...Read more about the changed value of Hyatt points here(22:20) - 1. Median point value dropped ~10%(23:10) - 2. Cherry-picked value dropped <10%(24:34) - 3. It could have been much worse(26:31) - 4. It will probably be much worse next year(27:46) - 5. Points more valuable with certain brands(30:37) - 6. Points less valuable with certain brands(32:14) - 7. Points are less valuable at high end(34:27) - 8. Points are more valuable at low end(35:54) - 9. Many cities offer excellent value(39:45) - 10. Singapore offers surprisingly poor value: 1.0(40:47) - 11. Worst and best values barely budged(41:52) - 12. Mr & Mrs Smith not as bad as we thoughtSubscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderMentioned in this episode:Visit FrequentMiler.com Did you know that Frequent Miller is also a website? At frequentMiller.com, you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards, the single best, Best Credit Cards page on the web, guides to all popular rewards programs, and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our posts sent to your email, go to frequentMiller.com/subscribe and sign up for free. https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/Check out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of Voyascape, a podcast network that brings together the world's best travel podcasts. You can find all of our podcasts from around the world at Voyascape.com. If you are interested in advertising or sponsored content on any of our shows you can find out more at the link below.Voyascape Podcast Network

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. On today's show, the 5X airline card saga continues. Nick gives us more reasons to use the Southwest app. We have exciting news about frontier, and we dive deep into Hyatt's devaluation. Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, 12 things to know about. about Hyatt's devaluation.

Hyatt switched to new, worse award charts in May. And we finally got a chance to do a deep dive into the data to see how bad is the devaluation really. And when I say we dove into it, I really mean Tim. But anyway, Tim did the hard work. And today on the show, we get to unveil what Tim found. And if you want to jump ahead to that, or you want to come back to something again later on,

Don't forget, you'll always find the timestamps in the show notes. So just expand the description box. Wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to give this a thumbs up. Give us a like. Leave us a review. We always appreciate hearing from you. All right. Let's drag out this week's giant mailback.

All right. This week's giant mail is the continuing saga of Nick having said on a show that no airline cards earn 5x or more on their own airline. And Greg having not stopped me from saying that, just to be clear. That's true. I just rolled with it. I didn't know better. On a previous episode, we mentioned that Gary Leff, View from the Wing had written in saying, well, actually, JetBlue cards earned 6x flying JetBlue, and there's a city, American Airlines Express or executive card that earns 5x, but only if you spend $150,000 on it. Well, lots of people wrote in after

that. That's not all. No, it's not all. So we and Gary forgot about the United Club card. So the personal United Club card earns 5x for United Flites. So we all forgot about that. David Rodan, he reminded us that the Qatar Airways Privilege Club Infinite card earns 5X for guitar flights. So somebody has that card apparently. And so I finally.

decided to do some homework before the show. And instead of just going with what people have told us, I went through our database of cards to see, are there any others? And I did find two popular cards that earn 5x. So first up, you've got the Frontier Airlines World MasterCard earns 5X and Frontier. And then the much more popular, a Velo Airlines World Elite MasterCard. also earns 5x. So there might be some other less popular cards that earn 5x that we're not aware of that aren't in our database, but that pretty much rounds it out. So, shoo, I think we can put this topic to bed, I hope. Oh, my goodness. If we had just gone to our best cards, our best category bonuses page, maybe we would have stumbled on these sooner, although I suspect that the relatively

low return on frontier miles may have kept it lower, although I say that, it probably worth a penny each anyway. So a decent return on any of those spending on airfare on those airlines. And good to finally get the record set straight. So thank you for that. Greg the frequent miler. We need to know. I just know we're going to have people write in with some other cards. I know there's something else out there. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Hopefully not. Crossing my fingers. All right. Let's talk about what crazy thing. What crazy thing did Chase do this week? Yeah. So a reader wrote in about points boost. You know how the Sapphire Reserve card offers up to two cents per point on the edit properties, which, you know, is better. So Chase points when booking travel or in hotels through the Chase Travel portal are worth one cent each, unless they are boosted, unless the thing you're looking at, the flight or the hotel is boosted, the edit properties are generally boosted.

at either two cents per point or 1.65 cents per point, and the two cents per point is becoming harder and harder to find over time. They've done some promo ones that are as high as 2.5 cents per point. But anyway, that's the state of things. What this reader wrote in to let us know was a surprise. He was able to show that some hotels are boosted differently, whether you're looking from your Sapphire Reserve Consumer Card or your business card.

And yeah, yeah, I have both cards right now, although I'm going to be canceling the business one really soon. And I was able to replicate that finding. This was in Montreal, two properties in Montreal. He identified. I was able to see it there. I looked at in a couple other cities where I didn't find any difference between the booths. So I don't know how widespread this is, but I just think it's good to know, I guess, that I don't know how many people. would have both of these cards. But if you do, check both because you never know.

Yeah. Well, that's definitely a crazy thing because I wouldn't have expected there to be a difference there for sure. And like you said, how few people would even be in position to know that there's a difference. But if you do have both, maybe in a household, you've got both of them, then I think that's a really important reminder to check. I would also then, and wonder if are there also some properties that are boosted that are with the business card that aren't with the consumer or something? I mean, who knows? Because that's not something that we would have thought to compare between the two. So, so interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Separately, some people have written in about the, when they look at hotels through the Sapphire preferred, sometimes

that are cheaper than through the Sapphire Reserve. But I think those are with like the Edit properties where you'd kind of expect because saffre preferred doesn't have the edit so it doesn't when you book through saffre preferred doesn't come with like free breakfast and other perks like that so um the sapphire reserve sometimes might be more expensive for that reason but i don't know i mean it could be too that the prices are just different depending on how you log yeah yeah well and keep in mind the chase has a best rate guarantee and you're not going to probably be able to file that against your Sapphire preferred pricing. But if the Sapphire preferred card sees a cheaper price, then probably you can replicate

that cheaper price somewhere else and do a price match on the Sapphire Reserve. If you have that feature attached to your account, which is not. Yeah, the ability to do a best rate guarantee is seems to be for all Saffirs or business cards, but seems to be targeted for Saffer Reserve consumer cards. Right. That should have been top of mind since I don't have the ability. to file one of those, but my wife does. So good point. Good point. All right. Let's talk about being Bonvoid, who is Bonvoid is this week, but Avianca Life Miles. And I'm as disappointed as anybody else

out there about it. So Life Miles runs a subscription service called Life Miles Plus, and Life Miles Plus has several different tiers. If you subscribe to the second tier or higher, so that's the $50 per month or higher, which they confusingly called the basic plan. The light plan is $20 a month. But if you subscribe to the $50 a month basic or higher, up until June 26th, you got free changes in cancellations as one of the major benefits of subscribing to that. And I've mentioned it before. And in fact, I had talked about strategically waiting to subscribe until you need to change or cancel an award, waiting to subscribe at least at the basic level. However, effective June 26th, they eliminated that benefit. So there are no more free changes and cancellations for new subscribers.

If you were subscribed before June 26th to the basic tier or higher, the $50 per month or higher, then you'll keep free changes and cancellations for 12 months. And then they're doing away with that benefit. So that really, really stinks. The other key benefit of those subscriptions is a 10% discount on award redemptions. And that's sticking around. But losing the free changes and cancellations, I mean, that's a huge part of the reason I would consider subscribing. So that kind of kills it for me. Yeah. I mean, I've long looked at that subscription thing as like, if I did get into life miles,

if I had a bunch of them, maybe if I ever signed up for a credit card or whatever, to get a bunch of life miles, I would be very interested in that because one of the things I value so much with some other programs, United American Airlines, Alaska is free changes and cancellations. And that would have given Life Miles that capability for a fee. And now you can't get it. Yeah. So my question for you is this.

I have the $50 per month subscription right now because I had to change an award this summer that I still need to cancel. So I will cancel that soon. And then I'll have a decent chunk of life miles. It was five passengers in business class to, Europe, so I'll have a decent little chunk of life miles. Do I keep this subscription in case I want to book something else with my life miles and still be able to cancel it, but have to pay $50 a month for the next year? Or do I just say, ah, I'm just going to not get free changes and cancellations. What would you do? Would you keep it? Well, I mean, you're still getting that 10% discount, right?

Sure, but you could do the $20 a month subscription for the 10% discount. Right, right, right. So let's say the $20 per month is definitely worth it to you because you have enough life miles that you're going to be saving a lot, right? So the difference is $360 for a year. How much would it cost to make a, let's say you made one change for your family? Usually $200 a person for international awards. It's tough, tough call. Yeah. I guess it comes down to how likely are you to use that feature.

It's sort of like that old insurance thing that you know, like you've mentioned before, you're betting on something going wrong. So would I make the $360 bet that I'm going to have to cancel something? Exactly. I mean, this year, the way we've had to change and cancel plans, I feel like that's a winning bet.

But most years it wouldn't be. So anyway, yeah, I don't know. That's an interesting dilemma. find yourself in that situation. We don't know there's not an easy answer. Like Greg said, it really just depends how likely you think it is that you'll need to change your cancel. I'll probably try to prioritize using my life miles. So I would think that creates more opportunity to need to change your cancel. So I'll probably keep it for at least a little bit and we'll go from there. See what I have booked. How many awards I have booked in the first few months here. Who knows?

All right. Let's talk about awards points and more. And awards points and more. First up, Apparently, Alaska Wallet Funds can now be used for Alaska companion fares again. Yeah, so, you know, the older versions of Alaska cards, so not the Atma Summit, but the other ones have the ability to get a companion ticket for paid fairs. And I'm stressing that because the new Summit card gives you a companion award thing. But this is for paid fairs. and for a while you haven't been able to use your Alaska wallet funds to pay for that. Now you can. So it's a very specialized thing.

But for those who it affects, I think that's really good news. Absolutely. Totally agree. And next up, Rove has added an exciting new transfer partner. They've added Frontier as a transfer partner. And there's a 25% transfer bonus. to Frontier from Rove through the end of July. So I mean, you know, it's always great to have new transfer partners.

A few things make this particularly interesting, I think. One is that Rove is the only transferable program that I know of that transfers to Frontier. And the other, another thing is that Frontier, the value you get for your points isn't like fixed. It's not like one cent per point. It varies a lot from, flight to flight and from what bundle you pick when you're booking a flight, you can get

up maybe around two cents per point at the high end. I certainly saw several cases when I was just poking around of around one and a half cents per point, which is not bad. So it's not like super exciting. You're not going to get like unbelievable value from a row of points, but it's not bad. And I'll also mention that I think for some people, Frontier might be more interesting than it used to be because with Spirit departing, Frontier is coming and taking a routes that Spirit had. So for example, I just looked last night and in Detroit, Frontier has a bunch of new routes with Spirit gone and or they're coming up soon anyway. And so, you know, the chance of flying frontier seems more likely than ever. And so if you have Rove Miles and you're looking to book a frontier flight, look at how much value you could get from your points.

And if it's good value, that could be pretty exciting. Yeah, you know, I could be a really good value. I gave it a sarcastic tone before. But even if you were only getting one cent per point out of your frontier, miles. We wouldn't recommend transferring from Frontier or rather from Rove at that rate. But even if you did at 1.25 cents per point, that's not the worst redemption out there. So it's not even terrible at the kind of what we would might consider to be the low end of a redemption. And certainly if you have a decent, you know, one and a half two cent and you add another 25% on top, certainly could be a good deal. Also,

I remember, I don't remember the details, but I remember several months ago Frontier had a promotion where they would like match your miles from another program up to 5,000 miles. And so we did the match in my family for everybody. So all of my family members have 5,000 frontier miles. And so the thing is that that's the low point for award tickets. They start at 5,000, but there are a lot of awards that aren't 5,000 and might be a good deal. So now being able to transfer from Roe makes it possible to top that off if there's a 10,000 point award I want. And that could be, I think.

particularly useful for people who did that match your miles thing. Cool. Okay. Next up, I have a couple of quick notes about Southwest Airlines. I flew Southwest this week, and a couple of the things that I thought were worth mentioning were first, I had wondered what would happen. Well, let me back up. If you have a Southwest debit card or select Southwest credit card, you get these annual

discount codes that show up in your Southwest account. It's not really a well-advertized benefit, particularly on the credit card side. but if you go into your Southwest account, you may find this under your promo codes. And I've written about those promo codes before. What I didn't know, I had to make some changes to plans this week. And I had booked a flight using one of those promo codes. And then we needed to change it. We decided on something different.

And I didn't know if I'd retain the discount. I didn't know if the coupon code would come back, for instance, if I canceled my initial flight. And so based on some reading I did on Reddit, I learned that, If you cancel, if you book with a promo code like that, one of those promo codes in your account for 15% off or 20% off based on your card, and you cancel, you'll lose the discount code. You don't get it back. So it's just gone.

However, if you change your flight, then it continues to apply the discount to the new flights when you're searching for new flights. And I confirmed that it does indeed work that way. It still takes the, in my case, it was 20% off of the newly rebooked flight. and in fact, we changed that flight a couple of times. And so I can confirm that you will keep the discount, even if you make multiple changes to your itinerary. So, moral of the story,

if you have got one of those 15 or 20% off discount codes from a debit or credit card, and you book something that you need to cancel, don't cancel it, change it to something far in the future, and then just continue to change it back to whatever you next need for the next trip in order to retain that discount. Do you know if you can extend the validity of a discount that way by booking something? So let's say it's going to expire at the end of this year.

You book something now that qualifies, but then you change it to one for next year. That's a great question. No, I don't know whether that would work or not. This is the first time I've ever run into the situation where I had booked something with the code and needed to make a change or cancellation. So, no, I don't know that. That's a great question. It might be worth trying if you've got one of those. those promo codes that's about to expire.

Sounds like a really good topic for someone to write in to our giant mailback. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Second piece. And this one I wrote down early in the week and said, oh, middle of the week, whatever it was, and said, we need to put this on the show. And then the very next day, a reader wrote in on one of our posts with a comment that

ran into exactly this situation. So I'm glad that it's coming up this week. So several months back, I had written about, well, let me back this one up again. too. If you have a Southwest companion pass and you are a credit card holder, your credit card benefits are meant to extend to your companion. So one of my sons is my companion. As a Southwest Performance Business Cardholder, for instance, I get access to extra legroom seating 48 hours before our flight. So he does too. And that's the way the benefit is meant to work. It gets a little complicated if you've got two household companion passes, though. And while I'm going to explain this

as a two household companion pass problem, I'm not 100% sure that that's the problem at play here. So you may listen up here anyway, even if you're only a one companion pass holder. Southwest has made it difficult if you have got both passengers, both adults, let's say the parents here in my case, my wife and I, we both have a companion pass. If we book my wife and I together under a single PNR, it's a little challenging to add both companions, her companion and my companion. But I discovered and wrote months ago that it works with the app that we can both add our companions to that single PNR that she and I are on if we each add our companion via the app. Okay, that's one piece of this. The other piece of this is that I had run into a situation where

one of our companions was not getting the credit card seat selection benefits. It wanted to charge for the extra legroom seats at 48 hours in advance, and that son couldn't even select, I think, standard seats right away at the time of booking. And somebody else ran into that this week. Well, I ran into that this week when we went to select extra leg room seats for a flight. And lo and behold, it occurred to me that I had actually added one companion via the Southwest website, Southwest.com, and the other companion via the app in this case, just randomly happened to have done it that way. And it was the companion I added on the desktop site who was not receiving the credit card seat selection benefits. And so because of that, I thought, well, this is weird.

What if I cancel the companion that I booked via desktop and re-added that same companion via the app? Would the seat selection benefits properly apply to his ticket then? And sure enough, they immediately did. I canceled his reservation that I had booked on the website, added him in the same. app and immediately was able to select because I was booking within 48 hours of departure, was immediately able to select the extra leg room seat that we wanted. All right. So to oversimplify, if you're flying Southwest, just use the app to do stuff instead

of the website as much as possible because it seems to work better. It does. It absolutely does. That is the moral of the story. So thank you for the summary on that one. All right. We'll be back right after this with our main event. We hope you're enjoying the Frequent Miler on the air podcast.

Did you know that Frequent Miler is also a website? At Frequentmyler.com, you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards, the single best, best credit cards page on the web, guides to all popular rewards programs and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our posts sent to your email, go to Frequentmiler.com forward slash subscribe and sign up for free. And we're back with today's main event. 12 things to know about Hyatt's devaluation. In May, Hyatt changed over from an award chart that had eight categories and three tiers of pricing within each category to a new one that still has eight categories, but now has five tiers within each category.

And higher prices sort of almost across the board within each of those tiers. So we gave it a little over a month, and we turned to our friends at Gondola that is a hotel search site, and they collect data across all chain hotels for a whole year in advance. And they provide us a way to dig into that data and see how valuable points are. So we had looked in depth at this data before the changeover, and now we looked at it again afterwards, and we found a lot of interesting things about this change. Yeah. So, all right. So starting with number one here, the median point value dropped about 10% already.

So three months ago, the reasonable redemption value of high at points, that's sort of the median point for award redemptions. that's essentially what we're using was 1.7 cents that was a three months ago 1.7 cents per point which was already a drop from where Hyatt points had been valued previously I mean if we really back up we were over two cents a point not that long ago but now the new reasonable redemption value is 1.54 cents which we've rounded down for simplification to 1.5 so our new reasonable redemption value for Hyatt points 1.5 cents per point so no doubt that's down. Yeah. Yep. And cherry-picked awards dropped a little bit less than 10%. So what I mean by that is we looked at the 75th percentile. So if you only look at the, you know, basically the best 25 percent of awards you could

have booked, then the value previously was 2.2 cents per point you would get from your points by cherry picking at that level, and that dropped to 2.0. At the 90th percentile, it dropped from 2.8 to 2.6, and that's a 7 percent drop. The 75th percentile one is about a 9 percent drop. So, you know, they dropped a little bit less than the median. And there's still, I mean, those are big numbers still. So there's still plenty of good value to be had from your Hyatt points. Yeah. And I think that's pretty interesting that if you're cherry picking your awards,

you can still be getting two cents or better. Now, you know, I say if you're cherry picking your awards, obviously it's going to depend on whether or not your travel plans are even going to happen to take you to where those 25% of properties. are during the time when they're actually presenting great value. So there's a lot of coffee ads there, but there's still some good opportunities. Absolutely. Absolutely. And number three, it could have been much worse. So, you know, I mentioned how we went from three tiers to five tiers per category. I had done a deep dive of the award chart changes before they took effect. And based on that,

analysis, I expected point prices to go up by at least 25%. Because if you look, because what I did is I assumed sort of my assumption was that the lowest award prices would map to the new lowest tiers. The mid, the mid middle prices would map to the new middle and the highest prices would map to the new highest. That was an assumption I made to make it possible to do an analysis, basically. At that level, I mean, middle prices would have gone up by 25%. Highest prices would have gone up by 48%. But we're seeing only a 10% decrease in the value of your point. So that doesn't tell you, you know, exactly.

You can't map that exactly to what I'm talking about, but it gives you an idea that it was not nearly as bad as it could have been. Right. Right, which is not a powerful compliment to receive. But true, and I think we found this to be the case. However, in fairness, I think we, as we'll mention, I'm sure later on, we expected that early on Hyatt would kind of ease us into this and not destroy the value all at once. So while we did make some predictions about where it was going, I think reasonably we expected that early on, they would give us a lot of opportunity to say it's not as bad as it sounded. But we don't know whether that'll continue to be the case for a long time. We can hope. But of course, the problem is it probably will get much worse next year, right? I mean, Hyatt told us that many more properties are going to change next year probably,

or not many more properties. Maybe that's the wrong way to say it. They said that they would gradually roll this out. So they have, I think they kind of, that the expectation that they were going to slowly take away the value, or at least, I think more so the expectation they set was that you'd still get good value out of your points, at least for a while. Yeah. Yeah. And that's our number four item here, is that it's probably going to get worse. So, you know, they no doubt deliberately mapped the old to new tiers in a way to try to

minimize how awful it was in the short term for the changeover, and then they'll gradually start introducing more and more properties being, you know, priced at that really bad peak, the new peak pricing, the new top pricing. Yeah. So that's our fourth point. I'm going to bring us to number five. Number five, points are more value. with certain brands. This is interesting. I think that it would seem intuitive to you, I bet, if you're a longtime Hyatt person, that there are some brands where you get, typically get better value out of your points, but I think the details of this are particularly interesting. So Tim found that the Hyatt-centric brand has a median value of about 1.65 cents per point.

Park Hyatt tends to yield 1.7 cents per point. Hyatt Place, Hyatt House, and J.D.V. About 1.75 cents per point. And coming in at the top, Greg. Drum roll, please. Hyatt Regency at 1.86 cents per point. So, I don't know. Do you find any surprises in here?

Do you find any surprising that you tend to get better value at a Hyatt place than you would at a Park Hyatt? Are you surprised that Hyatt Regency is sort of the... brand on top here? Yeah. Yeah, all of that's really interesting. I suspect we're going to talk more in a little while about how point values vary by how high end or low end things are. And I suspect some of the advantage of higher regency is that they tend to be on the lower end. But, you know, then you'd say, why would it be better, though, than Hyatt Place and Hyatt House and that that is a bit surprising to me.

I'm not sure what's going on there. Well, my guess, and this is a guess, but my guess is that Hyatt Regencies exist more often in expensive markets where you may be less likely to find a Hyatt place. And I say that, I mean, there's Hyatt Place and Hyatt House in New York City, and so obviously there are expensive markets

where that exists. But I think more frequently in like a businessy city, you're going to find a Hyatt Regency than a Hyatt House. So maybe they have some advantage there. where cash pricing is sort of, you know, outlandishly high at times and that presents opportunity. I don't know. I'm not surprised the Hyatt Place and Hyatt House tend to offer good opportunity for good value because most of them are lower category. And at the lower categories, I think typically, it's just easier to find those situations where rooms are not that cheap and value is still

outstanding with with Hyatt's award chart, even with the devaluation. Yeah. Although that's a good example of something that might change quite a bit. once they start actually using the high end of the word chart more often. It'll be a shame when that happens, though, because, man, that's been such a great thing, right, for so long that I've known that when prices are kind of silly, I can probably lean on a lower end high at for excellent value. I hope we still can, but you're right. It seems likely to change. All right.

Number six, points are less valuable with certain brands. So first before I mentioned these specific brands, let me say, that there's a bunch of brands that came in right around the median, the new 1.5, 1.54 area. So we're not sort of calling those out. But let's call out the ones where you're more likely to get worse than median value. From highest to lowest, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, we've got a median of about 1.4. And we're going to talk more about that at the end of the show. A bunch of the all-inclusive properties, Zalara, Ziva, Zootree Dreams came in at 1.3 or around 1.3.

So now it's getting pretty bleak, but you want really bleak. Look at Hyatt Residence Club. That came in at around 1.0. Ouch. Oh, no, I don't want really bleak. No, thank you, Hyatt. Yeah, that's rough. That's rough.

And I'm not actually very surprised to see relatively low. value out of the all-inclusives as they have continued to just increase pricing on the all-inclusives. Once they split them off of the regular award chart and then started increasing the pricing, I found those pretty unappealing years ago when they were on the regular award chart. They were often outstanding value, but that really changed once they split them off to begin with. So they haven't been amazing value for a long time. So yeah, that's a bummer. So those are the brands where you're just not going to probably get a great deal out of your high points most of the time.

Yeah. Yeah. Number seven, it's also become less likely to get a great deal at the high end. So this kind of bucks a trend. Most points programs, especially with award charts or capped award prices, you see the best value often at the very high end. But what we're seeing is that where point prices are 60,000 points per night or more, we're seeing a median value of 1.3.3.

three. Now, that is probably driven down a lot by the all-inclusives that we just talked about, by Mr. Mrs. Smith that has a lot of these high-end properties, and also by like the high, high, the super high-end, like category eight hotels. Now, I'm calling out category eight, because in that case, the award chart prices rose dramatically more than most other categories. So, for example, the new middle award price for Category 8 is higher than the old peak award price. And so any Category 8 hotels, the point prices definitely went up considerably there. Yeah, well, and you look at it, I mean, 60,000 points for more if you're getting 1.3 cents per point in value. that's $900 a night hotel. And so, you know, I think that probably the number of places and

times where hotels are commanding that kind of a rate have to be relatively small. And so I think as you increase the point price, you're going to run into that where you're just going to run into the, there's only so much the hotel is possibly going to charge somebody. So there's only so much value you're going to get out of that. And so like you said, historically, that has been where you could find the best. But now we're getting high enough that there's just a little upside left there. Although, I mean, again, if you get one point, if this is the median at 1.3. So if you get a better than that, if you get a 75th or 90th percentile, there still probably are plenty of opportunities to get solid value there, just not quite like it used to be.

I don't make it quite like they used to. Great. Point to become even more valuable at the lower end. And so this kind of goes along with what we were talking about before. So at the very bottom end of redemptions up to 5,000 points. You're looking at about 2.2 cents per point on average. Your redemptions in the 5 to 10k range, two cents per point median value and 10 to 15,000 points per night. You're at 1.7 cents per point. So those category, what is that? 15,000. Is that still category three property somewhere in the middle? I think I think around category three probably. Yeah. Yeah. So your category one, two, three properties in general, 10, to yield better value. And again, that's not surprising to me because hotels in general have gone

up enough in price over the last several years that even at that bottom end, properties have just gotten more and more expensive. So keeping point prices in those lower bands is going to continue to yield some good value. That's actually where I imagine I'll get the best value moving forward. I think I'll have a hard time parting with 60,000 points or 80,000 points or 75, whatever, the top end of category eight is these days when I know that I can probably stumble into a number of good situations each year to use like 15,000 points or less at pretty good values. So, so there you have it. At the low end, you're probably going to do a little bit better with Hyatt moving forward. All right. Number nine, many cities offer excellent value. And I find this list really interesting

because it's a mix of extremely expensive cities and probably even more, very low-priced cities. So because of this, so it's actually, it's kind of surprising that any extremely expensive cities show up, but the number one best value city that we found in this data set is Milan, where the median value, we're looking at a 3.8. So I'm guessing here that even though award prices are probably higher than before, that the Milan's like average price, the actual cash price is just so absurdly high that that's my guess here. I haven't looked at the actual data for that.

It seems like a good guess. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's that. That's a pretty outstanding value. Especially when you consider I don't know. I haven't looked either.

But the only high at property that at least for a long time, the only. Hyatt property there was the Park Hyatt, Milan, and then there were some Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties, I think. So surprising that we're at 3.8 with essentially the Park Hyatt seemingly likely to be the one drawing that up. I'm pretty sure there's like a Hyatt-centric or Hondas or something else there. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, there's a bunch that offer 2.5 cents per point or more, median. So we've got Hyderabad, India, Schaumburg, Illinois. This seems like such an eclectic list. Memphis, New Delhi, Rosemont, Houston. So all those places seem to offer really good value. And still, I'm going to just give a selection. For giving between two and two and a half cents per point value, there's a very long list. I'm going to just list a handful of those. We've got Milwaukee.

Montego Bay, Miami Beach, Chapel Hill, San Antonio, Tokyo, and Charlotte are some of the ones in that range. And then I'm not going to, there's a, there's probably a lot that are around 2.0, but a couple of very popular cities that are come in at around 2.0 are Chicago and New York. Yep. Okay. So some of those probably won't surprise anybody, but some of them probably will. we hit a few suburbs of Chicago in there and some random places where your points tend to be nicely valuable. All right. Well, that's interesting. I don't know. So do you get any meaningful takeaway there where like why is that or how is it useful? Yeah. You know, no, I mean, just sort of like, as I said before, I think there's a very interesting combination of places where, prices tend to be very high, that is, you know, forcing the value per point high, even with

the new award charts, and ones that have lots of properties, high at regencies and high at places and stuff that tend to offer good value. So, you know, I think it's an eclectic mix of those kind of things. Probably, these are also, this is probably also a list of place. places that do not have all-inclusives or many Mr. and Smith properties. I don't think there are too many all-incluses in Milwaukee, but I know that there is a regency at least one high at place. Exactly.

So that definitely tracks. All right. Number 10, Singapore offers surprisingly poor value for its points. One cent per point around 1 cent per point is the median at the Andaz, Singapore, the Grand Hyatt, Singapore, the standard Singapore. You know, that sounds surprising. But maybe I'm less surprised than you are about this because I have oftentimes been surprised in the other end that cash prices are sometimes much more reasonable in Singapore than I would expect for the size of the city. And I've run into that a few times before. So I'm not shocked that the value

is relatively poor compared to other places. I am shocked at one cent though. Wow. That's stunningly bad. Don't ever use your Hyatt points for that low. I mean, that's just so bad for Hyatt, for Hyatt. For other hotel chains, almost every other hotel chain, one cent is a really good redemption. But not for Hyatt.

All right. Coming in at number 11, the worst and best values barely budge. So from the gondola data, we can find, like, what is the lowest overall value per point? You can get at any hotel across the world. The lowest before the deval was 0.4 cents per point value. And the new lowest is exactly the same. The old highest was 8.3. The new highest went down to 8.2.

So you can get some... That's really the same. And so, you know, there is, there are situations out there where you can still get really spectacular value or spectacularly bad value. You got to watch out, you know, don't, don't book that 30,000 point night and that would otherwise cost you $50 in cash. Don't do it. Right, right.

That is an important takeaway for sure. All right. And finally, number 12. Mr. and Mrs. Smith is not as bad as we thought. And this, I find maybe the most intriguing little surprise nugget out of this, even if it's not the most valuable necessarily. So originally, we had Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties all between one cent per point and one point and one point four cents per point. That's where we found everything was shaking out. And at that point, I was not, or that value per point, I was not interested at all in Mr.

and Mrs. Smith. I was, in fact, the opposite of interest in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, in large part, because I was annoyed that Hyatt even put them into the fold, so to speak, without putting them into the award chart and made them relatively poor value. So I had mostly just scrolled right past Mr. and Mrs. Smith, even when they come up in search results, I rarely click on them. But I think you're going to tell me that that could be a mistake. I mean, it could be. So, you know, the new what we're seeing with the median values is 1.4 cents per point. So that's at the high end of what we previously thought. Now, let me say when I say previously, I mean when Hyatt first rolled out Mr. Smith, we poked around, looked at a bunch of properties ourselves, but we didn't do anything

nearly as comprehensive as what, you know, is what gondola can do for us. So it was just from poking around and we saw prices or point value starting at less than a penny and and really the high end was 1.4 we didn't think so for now for the median to be 1.4 that right there is is really surprising. The 75th percentile so if you are just kind of careful about which Mr. Mrs. Smith properties you're going to book and only book when the value is decent it shouldn't be hard to get 1.5 too which is it was the same as our new reasonable redemption value for Hyatt Point. So it's not a terrible use of your Hyatt points at that level. And then at the 90th percentile, you're getting 1.6 cents per point where, you know, it's not that much more than the median, our new RRV, but it's still

better than it. And so that's where like, you know, if you're seeing that, that's kind of interesting. If it's a place you wanted to stay and you're flush with Hyatt points, you know, suddenly it's like, hey, it's not a terrible use of your points anymore. And I think, you know, we warned at the outset here, things are going to get worse. But the reason things are going to get worse is because of what they're doing with the award charts. Mr. and Mrs. Smith is not on the award charts. So I don't expect Mr. and Ms. Smith values to get worse. I mean, it could happen as a separate thing, but there's nothing about the latest devaluation that suggests that's likely. So as other properties get worse, the median is probably going to drop below 1.5 at some day in the future.

At that point, if Mr. Smith stays where it is, suddenly it's going to look like good or just as good as other properties kind of thing, use of your high at point. So it's kind of a silver lining, I guess, is that, you know, Mr. Ms. Smith, which represents, represents a large portion of Hyatt's portfolio, but it's not on the award charts. It was so disappointing when that first rolled out is now at least something that those of us who care about the value of our points and how we use them, you know, suddenly it's like, okay, this is worth considering. Yeah, and I think that that's really the biggest piece for me. Those that care about the value we're getting for our points can consider these now

because they are in at least a good chunk of cases going to be around the same type of value you'd be getting for your other points. And I think that if I'm looking at it, obviously there's a lot of variables here, but generally speaking, if I'm looking in a city where I can get 1.6 cents per point booking the Hyatt Regency or 1.6 cents per point booking a Mr. and Mrs. Smith, there are a lot of situations where I might rather that Mr. and Mrs. Smith, because it's going to be kind of an interesting boutique type of a property. obviously if it's a million points for the Mr. and Mrs. Smith, getting 1.6 cents per point is not probably going to get me to book that over a reasonably priced award at a regency. But when award pricing is similar, I think there are more and more situations where I might say, oh, that Mr. and Mrs. Smith, that looks kind of quirky and interesting. And I'm not losing value by booking it. Whereas before I might have said, oh, that looks kind of quirky and interesting. But I'm not redeeming my points at less than 1.4 cent per point in value. So it doesn't matter how

interested I am. I wasn't going to book that one. Now, I think I'm more and more likely to look at that, or at least I should look at it and bust out my calculator and see, because in those 90th percentile type situations, I'm okay with redeeming my Hyatt points at that value now, because I don't expect that our reasonable redemption value will continue to climb for Hyatt. So at 1.6, I'm looking at those redemptions and saying, yeah, all right, I can, I can live with that now, so I don't have to live with 1.3 later on when it continues to devalue. Yeah. Yeah. All right, this is so interesting to hear you say, Nick, because I remember previous episodes where you said, you're not interested in boutique hotels. You like the chain hotels or you know what to expect. Yeah.

They're there with kids. You don't want, but I've always been the one who's been like, yeah, I'm really in a boutique hotel. So that's why I was like the most disappointed. when they rolled out Mr. Ms. Smith at such poor value. And so I'm surprised. It's cool. It's cool that we're both in this boat of like, hey, suddenly this is interesting. And yeah, I mean, you know, it's obviously not fun to think that your high at points now are worth less than they were before. But once you accept that fact, you could either accept that fact and say, Mr. Ms. Smith now is,

an okay use, especially when you could get like the 90th percentile, or you could not accept it and say, I'm only going to use it for those, you know, certain cities, those certain brands that get, you know, over 1.8, whatever you want to choose as your level. So I'm not sure where I am in that equation right at this moment. I'm probably, I'm probably around one, like, what's the point value I need to feel good about using my high points now, knowing with this data in hand? And I'm guessing, I'm probably around 1.6-ish, which is right at that high end for Mr. Ms. Smith, but I'm not sure that I've really come to a conclusion. How about you? You know, I first of all, I'm going to mention that I do appreciate a cookie cutter hotel more than Greg, probably. But so I do like that predictable experience, just like you mentioned. But I'm more open to the boutique properties these days than I would have been eight years ago. That's for sure.

Or even probably five or six years ago. Anyway, where am I? Well, I have to, I can say what comes to my mind, but I have to go by what I've actually done. And recently, I have redeemed Chase Ultimate Rewards points for points boost at 1.65 cents per point. I redeemed a whole bunch for a luxury property at 1.65 cents per point. So if I'm willing to do that with points boost at an edit property, then I think that, yeah, you're like around 1.6 for high. It is probably around where I'm, I'd be acceptable in doing that. So I think that it's unfortunate. Like if you asked me that question a year ago,

I always target two cents per point or better for Hyatt points. And therefore, in my case, for ultimate rewards points. But the writing is on the wall. You're not going to get that value forever unless you're able to constantly always cherry pick. And I know that I won't always be able to do that. So I think 1.6 at this point is where I'm like, okay, that's still a good redemption. It's not as exciting as it was before.

but like you said earlier, big point here is that it's still much more valuable than most hotel points on the market. This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder, music by Annie Yoder. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today and you'd like to get more of this in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Join our Frequent Myler Insiders Facebook group. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this or give it a thumbs up. If you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week

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