Frequent Miler on the Air - First impressions of the new World of Hyatt order | Coffee Break Ep107 | 5-26-26

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

The World of Hyatt new award charts are live now, and we have thoughts! We'll give our first impressions in this episode, and you can read more about the new award charts here.(00:25) - World of Hyatt's new award charts are live(01:44) - Where it hurts the most(04:05) - It's not all doom and gloomRead more about our first impressions here.(11:55) - AnalysisSubscribe 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: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 NetworkFrequent Miler's Best Offers Pagehttps://frequentmiler.com/best-credit-card-offers/

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world atvoyescape.com. Welcome to Frequent Milers Coffee Break, the first impressions of the new world of Hyatt Order. Welcome to Frequent Milers Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points. Each coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or less or your money back. Is the new order the dark side or the light? And so, Nick, it is March 27, or May 22nd, as we record this. The end of the Hyatt Award charts came two days ago. And with it, the quote-unquote new Hyatt Award charts.

Now, these new Hyatt Award charts have eight categories and five pricing tiers for the normal Hyatt hotels, six categories and five pricing tiers for the all-inclusives. And another six categories and five pricing tiers for Miraval. So not even counting Mr. and Mrs. Smith, our Hyatt award charts now include, if I'm doing my math right, a hundred different possible prices. A hundred. Now, I don't know what kind of like, the line between dynamic and chart is getting really fuzzy here. And that's before we even get to standard and premium suites. So now we're two days into this.

What have you found? Like, have you seen changes? Or are you, what are you seeing as your fingers are tickling the ivories of the high booking engine? Yeah. I mean, we obviously are seeing changes. Some are obviously painful and some are better than we might have expected. So where it hurts the most so far is pretty much things that we expect it. So for instance, category changes.

Category changes are pretty painful because not only did properties go up in category, but then because of the plethora of pricing tiers, the difference could be pretty significant. I mean, a small example for me is that as we record this, I'm at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cyprus in Orlando, Florida, a property that we've really enjoyed for years and has been a category for, for a very long time. So you've been able to use free night certificates here, and it's generally been available for 15,000 points a night, 18,000 points peak. And so I actually, just before the changes went live, I used a couple of my category one to four free night certificates to lock in a

reservation for later this year for nights that were 18,000 points per night at the time when I booked them. But of course, now this is a category five property and those same dates, just to a couple of hours after I booked went up to 25,000 points per night. So that's a significant percentage increase. I mean, it's almost a 50% increase at that point. So that hurts for properties like that, particularly. All inclusives have gone up significantly in some cases. And of course, in general, at the high end is where we see the biggest pain points.

I mean, property like the park high at New York, I would often see available for 45,000 points a night. And now when I'm looking at December weekend dates to go see the Christmas displays and things, 75,000 points a night. I mean, it's a huge, huge jump. Park High at Zurich, I was looking at a night there that was 45,000 points a few days ago. Now it's 75,000. And at that price, I mean, that's really hard to part with 75,000 high at points for a single night. My gosh, that's crazy.

I mean, when you think about it, like, you know, it's not recently, it's not uncommon for a welcome. offer on the Chase Inc. Cards, the new annual fee cards, it would be 75,000 points. So now if you transfer those to Hyatt, you're looking at one night at the Park Hyatt, Zurich, one night in New York during Christmas season. Like that is crazy. Yeah, it really is. And so there's definitely some big pain points at that end of the spectrum. But it's not all doom and gloom because we've seen a number of properties that have actually gone down in price. The off-peak pricing in general has moved to lowest. So properties that were priced off peak before, for the most part, of course not in all situations, but for the most part, they've moved to the new

lowest band. And I really didn't expect that to happen as broadly as it did. And when they have moved to that new lowest ban, they've decreased in price. I booked a category one off peak property because it was 3,500 points a night. So I wanted to make sure I got that booking in before the price, I assumed would go up. But sure enough, it dropped to the new lowest tier. So it's only 3,000 points a night now. And I booked that property late in the year so that I'd be able to have a mattress run if I need it.

And so now it's costing me even fewer points than before. And Stephen provided a whole bunch of examples like that with properties that were off peak or kind of in their shoulder seasons that actually decreased in price. And that's encouraging to see. I think that really demonstrates the fact that there are still opportunities. for good value in World of Hyatt. So that's good news. A lot of the sort of standard pricing properties went to the new low tier, which again, I expected they'd probably bump all those up to the moderate level and increase prices, but in a lot of cases, prices have stayed the same, maybe even dropped

a few thousand points or gone up just a couple thousand. I would look at free night certificates and say free night certificates have more potential point value now. And I word that specifically because it's not that the certificates themselves have become more valuable in the sense that they're not buying more hotel than they did before, but they're saving you more points than they did before because that category four before peak price was 18,000 points and now it's 25,000 points at peak price. So if your option is to either use a free night certificate or use points, you're going to keep more points for a future stay somewhere if you use your free night certificates.

And the same thing is going to be true at Category 7. So I wouldn't expect more value out of those. But again, it'll keep more points in your pocket. You won't have to transfer as many points for one of those bookings, you know, as you would. Otherwise, you wouldn't have to, you could save yourself the transfer of a large number of points. And as we've noted before, the cost to upgrade to a club room or standard or premium suite hasn't changed. So if you find a place with a really good cash rate, you can still upgrade to a suite or even a premium suite for just $6,000 or $9,000 points per night, which can be a slamming deal on the right situations. And so it's great to see that that hasn't changed at all.

I mean, are you seeing similar things in your searches? What about the places you've booked? Do they mostly go up in price? Yeah, that's a, so there's a, and there's, so Drifty Traveler posted a, like, effectively like a day. after analysis where they looked at a couple hundred thousand Hyatt dates across all the different categories from one to eight and they generally found that category sevens and eights overall either for the like and this is comparing effectively like November 7th at this property before the change to November 7th at this property after the change so it's it's property in that comparison and they found

that there's there was quite there's category sevens and eight have either stayed the same or gotten more expensive with about two-thirds of the category nights or the nights for category sevens and eight is getting more expensive. Categories one and two, by and large, got less expensive to the point that the nights that they looked at for category ones, the category ones that are actually left, 92% of those nights were less expensive than they were before, whereas Category 4, 5, and 6 broadly were kind of about half of the nights across those three categories were broadly the same. About a third had gone up and about a third had gone down. So by and large, like kind of what you're saying, what they noticed was that the

worst hit properties were the category sevens and eights. For me personally, that tracks. I did probably, I don't know, you know, I mean, I kind of got into a fever pitch when the, when the world of high booking engine was melting down the night before. You're like, well, you know, I might go to London for five days in the middle of April. I might as well book that. So I just had a bunch of random bookings from all over the place. And probably about a third of them went down. And so I just rebooked them because I didn't know how quickly high it would be, would get around to refunding that difference. Probably about a third of them stayed the same. And probably the rest got slightly more expensive, but slightly. Like maybe.

a thousand points, two thousand points. There was really only one example and it was the impressions in Mox J, I think is how you pronounce it down in the Riviera but near Pallad del Carmen. That actually jumped up 5,000 points. But that was the extent of it. But that said, I wasn't booking a bunch of like I wasn't booking the park high in New York. I wasn't booking Park High in Zurich. I wasn't booking what tells it in Tokyo. And those really got pummeled from what I can So, you know, we are intentionally, we do a reasonable redemption value for a whole kind of portfolio of hotel and hotel points, airline miles that we kind of reexamine every year what the median point value is that you can expect to get from these, from various currencies.

And Hyatt's one of them. And we just did that to get kind of a baseline before, about a month before the changes happened. And we probably will not. redo that until for another month or two because we kind of want to see Hyatt told us that these changes would be getting rolled out slowly and I imagine whenever we see these sorts of things happen it always seems to be that like right afterwards people are like oh that isn't so bad and then six months later it's sort you know like the the the change is palpable because they know everybody's looking right now right and so my sense is that what I'm what we're seeing now now is outside of those, yeah, it sucks for category sevens and eight.

It sucks for Tokyo. It kind of sucks for New York, really. But overall, it was worse. It wasn't as bad as I was expecting. Like there was nothing that I had booked beforehand that I would look at the price now and say, oh, I'm not going to, I wouldn't have booked that now. However, I can't imagine that this is not the best it's going to be. Well, that's a good question.

There is the high watermark. In my opinion, right here is the high watermark. We're now, will it be drastically worse? Are we looking at, you know, things are going to get 30% more expensive overall or whatever going forward? I'd have no idea, but I think that it's going to get worse from here. That would be my bet. And it's obviously not net positive change, you know, like on the whole, it's, you know, saving 500 points on a 3,500 point in a night off peak, a category one property is nice,

but having to pay 30,000 points extra for a peak, A category aid property way outweighs that, especially for, you know, the aspirational properties that a lot of people tend to use their points for. But so like, what do you, what do you think? Like is this, are you waiting for the other shoe to drop? Like, do you think this is like, do it, do you feel like, oh, I, I've made it over the waterfall and now I can kind of coast down. Or do you feel like, oh, this is just the beginning of something that we're starting to see here? Well, that's a very good question. And we'll talk more. more about that and our full analysis right after this.

Hey, Nick, I just got a text from my cousin. He's asking me about a credit card offer he just got in his email and asking if it's any good. Yeah, well, your cousin ought to go to frequent myler.com and click the link at the top of the page for our best offers page. That's the best way for your cousin to know whether or not they're getting a good offer because we're committed to publishing the best publicly available offers. So if you see an offer for a credit card anywhere on the internet, you should always compare and make sure you're getting the best possible offer. And we're back.

All right. So we got to analyze this a little bit and take a look at it. So, you know, I know that we've kind of said that so far it's a little tough to judge because it's early. And I agree with you on that. I think it is pretty early to make a big judgment call on what this is going to mean in the long term. But let me ask you, based on what? what you've seen so far, all right? Does this affect whether or not you're going to continue to chase World of Hyatt status? I know that you've kind of considered that some before,

and you've got global status now, right? So the changes as you've seen them so far, do they, how do they influence your decision to continue to go after that? Well, you know, there's a lot of other factors that I think affect that decision besides this award chart change. this award choice change is just sort of like one factor out of probably five or six. However, just confining it to that one factor, if it was just what it happened yesterday, just what I've seen so far, I would feel relief because I would have been anticipating worse. However, I also don't tend to book a lot of category seven and eight properties to begin with. and I think that's sort of my, that's where my particular use case is a little bit different

than a lot of people's. So if I, like, if I was using the majority of my points to stay in Tokyo and to go to New York and stay at the Park Hyatt or the, what's the other one, the Manor there, what's the, the other unbound collection, I think it's the manner, or Park Hyatt, Zurich, for instance, or those, those kinds of properties that Grand Hyacuai is going to be brutal, I'm sure. I would be really, really bummed out. Like, I would be really, really bummed out. And it would affect, you know, if that was where the majority of my points were being used for,

I would probably, I would be skeptical about it. Just what I've seen so far based on the properties that I tend to look at in book, I wouldn't say that it's enough of a net negative for that alone to make me reconsidered globalist. What about for you? That's tougher for me, because, you know, you know, you know, you know, you. Absolutely what you just said is true for me that the majority of my stays are not those types of places. However, I chase status so that I can have benefits when I do redeem for those types of stays.

So I think that at least to some extent, it changes the way I feel about chasing status because I'm no longer chasing status so that I'll get free breakfast when I go to the Grand High at Kauai or when I stay at the Thompson Central Park because I'm at least somewhat less likely to stay at those places now, although the Thompson Central Park is perhaps a bad example, because in many cases, that hasn't gone up all that much. But my point anyway is that, like, you know, the park high at Vienna, let's use as an example. It's a great place that we stayed for Christmas markets. And I'm not going to probably stay there again at the prices that they're going to charge at those peak times. So it decreases my desire to chase status to some extent. However, that said, like you said, I think a lot of the properties I stay at most often haven't really seen much change yet. So at this point, you know, in fact, when I say that, just this week I had a couple of nights that I booked at the last minute, not for the future.

I'm saying for nights that I stayed this week before the category changes happen, I stayed at two different high at places this week. And both of those are still about the same price for all of the nights that they were before. When I look out weeks from now, they're still about the same price that I paid or even a little bit less for one of those two properties. And so there are a lot of those situations where, like, I'm booking a night that I just need a night near an airport or in this city or that city that I think Hyatt is likely to continue to offer the best value. And so I'll probably end up staying in Hyatt's. You know, when I look at one of those nights, I got delayed and I was going to get to the airport very late. And Marriott would have cost me 30,000 points a night to stay at a Marriott. Instead, I paid $8,000 for a Hyatt.

And it's going to be the same way, basically, in the future in a lot of cases. So I probably will still end up with it at least next year. But a point you touched on before is one that's certainly on my mind. Are we just waiting for the other shoe to drop? Like, is this just, like you said, to kind of put on a good face, to make a good face, to make it look, oh, like, that's not so bad now so that they can kind of gradually increase these later? What do you think? Are you skeptical about that? Or do you think that Hyatt is going to really try to continue to maintain value? Well, I think they're going to try to maintain value. And I think there's

so really negative changes that we're going to see happen later. I think it's a both end, you know. And, you know, and honestly, I think you bring up what you bring up what I was thinking of when you we're talking that I think is a really good point, is that on the one hand, one of the great things about Hyatt is it's really the only one of the major brands where you can get good value for lodging with transferable points. You can earn your transferable points, which tend to be the easiest ones to earn and get good value for them. And that will probably remain the same. I just can't imagine that it's going to ever flip or all of a sudden earning Marriott or redeeming your membership rewards for Marriott points or something like that is going to end up providing more value

than Chase or bill points for Hyatt in terms of your lodging costs. However, the bummer is that up until now, Hyatt was probably the only one of the major chains that did not have a property that I would not pay that price to stay there in points. Like anything there. And, you know, like even like my wife really wanted to go to a Mirabal property. And we paid 70,000 points enough to stay at the Mirabal. property. When I do that all the time, no. Did that feel like a huge splurge? Yes. And we had a fun time and we had one of the Mirabal certs and everything. But that's the most that I've ever spent on a high property.

And it's a little exclusive to get off the classes and stuff. But besides that, like it's 45,000 points a lot to spend for a night. Yes. Is it something that you could do for a splurge? Yes. Now all of a sudden, when we're looking at 75, 85, no, I'm not going to do it. You know, just not going to do it. And so I think that's what's really changed. That's a, that's a change in that in the program that will never be walked back. And that really is a bummer because Hyde is sort of the, the shining example that that, before that those asperation properties remain within the bounds of a splurge. And now they're not.

Yeah. Just like, yeah. Just like Perion, just like IHG. I think maybe that's the, I think the part that affects me the most emotionally about it. And I got to recognize that there are still places. where they have that appeal. You know, I looked, for instance, at the Maldives, and the properties in the Maldives are still about the same price they were before.

They haven't gone up substantially, at least for the sets of dates that I checked. And so, you know, if that's a place that's on your bucket list, in that instance, Hyatt is still offering a decent deal that you're going to look at and say, okay, well, I'm willing to splurge for that. But there are just quite a number of places where, exactly, as you said, I would have felt okay splurging in the past. And now I look at that 75,000 point night. And I say, well, that's 10 of those airport nights in the future someday.

And I don't want to give up that many points and not have those points for the other stays that I want to make. So I think that's the biggest bummer of it that it does feel like we've sort of lost that high end. So is that going to change your behavior? Is that like, I mean, you already said that that's not the majority of your stays. So does that really affect you at all? Yeah. Yeah, it does. I mean, as I think about it, you know, my heart's shriveling a little bit about it.

And I mean, and it's partially just because like, you know, the friend I've known isn't the same friend anymore. You know, they've changed. They went to the big city and have an expensive apartment and don't want to hang out with me anymore. And what I will say in part and this is not, and again, there are more, more factors than this. but it does make me more interested in programs like a core to sort of explore that. I transferred a bunch of points from city to preferred hotels. Now we have all of these fine hotels and resort credits that I have a ton of that I've actually been really enjoying using. And so it does, you know, yes, it's a bummer and it gives me more of wandering.

So speaking of a wandering eye here, this is a question. I don't know the answer to at all. Have you looked at all at Mr. and Mrs. Smith? Has the value prop changed at all for Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties through any of this? Yeah, not that I can tell. But I mean, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is already,

like it's already fully dynamic. And they're the, you know, good value at Mr. and Mrs. Smith would be 1.4, 1.5 cents per point. So, you know, I don't know that there's, my fear is that they're going to, is that Hyatt's wants to sort of turn the rest of their portfolio into what Mr. and Mrs. Smith is now. And so I don't know that there's any reason to mess around with Mr. and Mrs. Smith, right?

My guess is we won't see a lot there. But have you noticed any difference? No, I haven't. And I would imagine the same thing. I think an important thing to keep in mind here, though, is that, you know, as you and I talk about the bummers, sort of, you know, the things that were bummed out about, the properties that have become more expensive. We're both recognizing the fact that there are still lots of situations where we're going to get good value. And so at least for me, I'm not jumping ship anytime soon. You know, while I'm still getting great value, I'm going to continue to get great value.

I'm not going to like burn up my high at points and turn my back. When it comes down to it, just like that situation I mentioned the other night where I was getting to the airport late, I was getting more than two cents a point out of my high at points. And I'm still confident that I'll find enough situations like that to keep it a program that's top of mind for probably a long time. I would agree with your skepticism about slow rolling the changes here. And I bet that probably we will see places increase over time. Because, I mean, you're right. They're very aware of the fact that everybody, all of their members,

all of the people who write about this stuff, media probably were looking at what was going to happen with this this week. And so I'm sure that they were trying to put a best foot forward. And we will see changes over time. But I still at this point anyway, way, this sliver in time, feel pretty good about Hyatt points, at least for the short term. When that's going to change, I don't think we know, but I'm not going to stop collecting points, particularly not the points that I can transfer to Hyatt when and where they are valuable.

I'm not going to stop that activity anytime soon, because I think they'll continue to offer value for quite a while. I think your point about reassessing the reasonable redemption value in a couple of months is also an important one. And I think that that's something to keep an eye out for when Tim does publish that post again in a couple of months and see, okay, well, where have things gone? Because we're able to gather quite a bit of data from gondola.gondola.a.coma.coma.coma.comers that with us. So that we can really get a good look at what points are actually worth in real world scenarios. And I think that's really going to tell the tale and let us know, okay, where are things? Is there still enough value to make this program worth it? And I think you and I both suspect that there will be.

And what does it all mean? No, absolutely. And so I think probably if I could summarize, if I'm understanding what you're saying, and I think we're kind of, we're effectively on the same page is that. Short term, I'm going to qualify for globalists next year. I'm planning to continue to book Hyatt into 2007 and we'll continue to go with the program throughout the next year, where the sort of the crux will come, is not this year, but next year to see where we're at maybe in another year or so and to find out like are we still getting

the value from the effort that we have to put forward to earn globalist returned to us when we actually use those points. Is that kind of where you're at as well? That is absolutely true. Now we didn't mention at the outset that Greg is on vacation this week. And so it's been Tim, if you're listening to this in podcast forum and you were like, Greg, your voice has changed. It's been Tim with us this week. And, And because Tim is filling in, this week's refund is going to come out of his paycheck because we went over. Totally. So the frequent myler cash.

I have a deep reservoir of frequent miler bucks that I am waiting to shower on everyone. I have like 1.8 billion frequent miler bucks that I am going to share. There we have it. All right. So world of high changes encapsulated for now. Keep an eye out on the blog for how that all shakes out. the coming months. 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 Miler 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 or a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for our giant mailbag. You can send that to? Send it to mailbag at Frequentmiler.com. Hey guys, Aaron Miller here from Armchair Explorer,

and I just wanted to let you know that our new series is out now. We've got kiteski across Antarctica, Aboriginal storytellers, and the craziest whitewater race in the world. We're going on a bucketless hike across Italy. We're going to the Fjords of Norway in search of the Northern Lights and lots, lots more. Our goal is to take you on the journey. trip of a lifetime every single week. You can find Armchair Explorer on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you're listening right now and at voyescape.com.

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