Frequent Miler on the Air - World of Hyatt is broken. Here's how to fix it. | Coffee Break Ep43 | 1-28-25

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

World of Hyatt has been a favorite amongst points and miles enthusiasts for years. You can use your points for excellent properties at typically excellent values and the elite benefits are actually valuable. But...they're far from perfect, especially more recently. Not to worry - we have some suggestions for what they can do to get back on track. (00:10) - Has been a great program for years Read our Hyatt wishlist here. (02:20) - Long term problem: limited number of hotels (04:29) - But they've killed a lot of the progress they'd made towards the footprint problem and moved instead towards dynamic award pricing (07:54) - Our suggestion: Fix Mr & Mrs Smith awards (10:54) - Or, more realistically: Fix free night certificates Visit 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 – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads

Welcome to Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points. And each Coffee Break is limited to 20 minutes or less, or your money back. World of Hyatt is broken, but we're going to talk about how to fix it. Yeah, you know, World of Hyatt was great for a lot of years. I mean, really, it's been probably our favorite hotel program and a favorite of most. And there's a handful of reasons in particular why we love it so much. First of all, you can get extremely good value when you're using your Hyatt points to stay at Hyatt properties, which is probably the most important thing to a lot of people.

You can very, very commonly get excellent value when you're using points for awards. And that's true, not just at one end of the award chart or the other, but really top to bottom. Of course, not every award every time is going to be a great value, but the vast majority of them are really good value. It's not too difficult to get great value for your points. They have best in class top tier elite benefits. As a Hyatt globalist, you get stuff like free breakfast or lounge access. I just spent a weekend in New York City, and we got free parking because it was an award stay and we were globalists, which was, I think, $85 a night, it would have been plus tax. And that, of course, was waived. So that's really nice to get no resort fees, even on paid stays as

a globalist, lots of good stuff there. They have the best milestone rewards of any program. As someone who stays often or earns a lot of elite nights in the program, you can earn things like suite upgrade awards. I used one of those to have a suite in New York City, tons of space for Manhattan. And you know, lots of other stuff like the guest of honor awards where you can extend globalist benefits to someone else. And I've recently used that as well. So they get their free parking and free breakfast, etc. And of course, on that note, there's a lot of different ways to share, you can share those guest of honor awards, you can share things like your free night certificates, or your suite upgrades, you can transfer those to

other people. And that's really awesome. Even your points, you can move points to another member, there's no cost, you can only do it once every 30 days, but it's free to do. And so that can be a great way to put your points together within a household, to move your free night certificates as need be so that the person with status is able to use them, for instance. So a lot of things to love. When it comes to World of Hyatt, there's a lot of stuff to love. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I love all those things. What I don't love is that Hyatt has a very limited footprint when you compare to other like big chains like the Marriott or Hilton or IHGs of the world. And what I really don't love

is that they've changed how they've addressed it. So if you go back a few years, the way they used to address it was actually really good. They would form partnerships that were good for both them and their members. So for example, when they partnered with SLH, small luxury hotels, they put all the participating hotels into their award charts, and we're still able to use points to get outsized value. We're able to use our free night certificates because remember Hyatt's free night certificates are all based on what category the hotel is in. And if the hotel's not fit into a category in our award chart, you can't use your free night certificate there. So they did it so that you could. And they didn't have elite recognition per se, but they gave enough benefits like free breakfast to all members

who booked through Hyatt. So they did a good job there. Similar story, destination hotels. When they first bought destination hotels and residences, the residence part of that, which are like condos and standalone houses and things, they shove those into the existing ward charts. And what I mean by that is like, they, you know, a lot of these are like a house, you know, you have like a one bedroom house that would be fit into the ward chart as a standard room. Two bedroom might be fit in as like a standard suite and a three bedroom might have been a premium suite, for example.

But they figured out a way to get those same, you know, very different type of lodging into the existing award charts. And so we were able to get all the benefits, including outsized value. And that was especially great at the time, because it opened up tons of good value properties in Hawaii when they did that. You know, they started off addressing the the lack of having many hotels in a good way. But then things changed. Yeah, yeah, for all the progress they made, and they were really knocking it out of the park for a while. They've unfortunately killed a lot of that progress. And now we're on a very dynamic system when it comes to award pricing with the new additions they've made to

address the footprint problem. And here are some examples of that. Those destination residences we were talking about moved to Hyatt Homes and Hideaways. And Hyatt Homes and Hideaways has sort of a fixed value award redemption scheme where you get about 1.2 cents per point, significantly less than what you typically get redeeming your points for a Hyatt hotel and significantly less than what you used to be able your points for a Hyatt hotel and significantly, excuse me, significantly less than what you used to be able to get when those properties were on the award chart. Small luxury hotels of the world that partnership ended and moved over to Hilton. And instead, Hyatt bought Mr. And Mrs. Smith, which seemed like it would be great news,

and they'd be fully integrated. But unfortunately, they've done the same thing that I just mentioned, in that they've made awards vary according to the cash price. The good news there is you can book any room type with points. But the bad news is you'll get the same subpar value for your points no matter which room you're booking at a Mr. and Mrs. Smith property. Under Canvas got added as like sort of these are I think glamping sort of luxury tents and things. But that's under the Mr. and Mrs. Smith umbrella. So the same relatively poor value redemptions. They recently announced a partnership with Venetian and Palazzo in Las Vegas, which was meant, I think, to sort of plug a hole that they had because they used to have a partnership with MGM, which we didn't even mention

here. And they lost that. But they added Venetian and Palazzo. And when they did, rather than have them as somewhere on the award chart, they did this same dynamic pricing scheme where sometimes you're getting even, actually, most of the time, I think you're getting even less than one cent per point in value when you're redeeming your points at those properties, which is a huge disappointment. So the overall problems with these additions they've made now to address the footprint problem are that you get poor value for your points when you're redeeming at those places. I guess it's nice if you want to earn points on a paid stay, but if you want to use your points to

good value, those are not going to be the best options. You have limited elite benefits. You don't have any standard elite benefits in any of those additional things that we just mentioned. Destination residences, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the Venetian and Palazzo elite benefits are very limited. They range from a little limited to really limited. And you can't use your free night certificates with any of these properties. So if you have a World of Hyatt credit card or you're earning a free night certificate as a milestone benefit of achieving 30 elite nights with Hyatt or 60 elite nights with Hyatt. You can use that at a lot of properties, but not any of these that they've added to kind of, again, address the problem that they have a small footprint. They've added some exciting new properties, but you can't use your free night

certificates at those properties, which is a big disappointment, I think. Yeah, yeah. And the whole thing is pretty depressing because it's like I still love Hyatt for itself, for the Hyatt hotels where you get all those elite benefits, where you get outsized value with your points. It's still a terrific program for that, but they've so bungled in my mind how they've expanded outward with all these partnerships that it's really, I find it pretty depressing. Well, and it feels like if, you know, maybe they'll add some more in the future, but when they do, it's probably going to be bad value again now, right? I mean, that's the thing that now looking forward, it really kind of bums me out. But, you know, I don't want to be all doom and gloom. We got to talk about, well, what can they do? How can they fix this?

What can they do, Greg, if they want to fix world of Hyatt and what they've done here? I've got two suggestions for Hyatt. Now, you might think that my number one suggestion is like, start all over, go back to the way you used to do things, which would be ideal, but I'm not going to be that unrealistic about things. I think that what they've done so far with these partnerships is not likely to get undone. So assuming that those are here to stay, here's a couple patches that Hyatt could make that could make a big difference in the world. First one, add standard room pricing for their partnerships, especially Mr. and Mrs. Smith. And Mr. and Mrs. Smith has such a large footprint that if they did it just with the Mr. and Mrs. Smith. And Mr. and Mrs. Smith has such a large footprint that if they did it just with the Mr. and Mrs. Smith hotels, that would be great. And the idea

is basically to do this with as many participating hotels as they can. I understand that they wouldn't be able to get all of them on board, but basically have each hotel that wants to participate identify some number of rooms that would be named standard rooms. The idea is that when those are available, they are priced with points according to an award chart. That's it. And it could be anywhere on the award chart. We're okay with that based on how high expensive this hotel is. But put it on the award chart or you know we're okay with that based on you know how high uh expense of this hotel is but put it on the word chart and then um continue to offer the other rooms as dynamically priced and but can anybody do that right it sounds impossible but hilton is doing that

right now with slh properties they have that exact same scheme where standard rooms are priced according to Hilton's invisible award chart. They have a hidden award chart, but they do have one. And all other rooms are priced dynamically as premium room awards. So if Hilton can do it, come on, Hyatt. I mean, Hilton is so far behind you on most things, yet they are eating your lunch with this partnership stuff. So get on board there and, you know, show them. You could show them, right, that you could do even better? Right. I would think.

I would think, especially considering the fact that, you know, Hilton has a partnership with SLH, which is already a loose partnership of hotels. So, I mean, whatever, you know, that's got to be relatively loose in terms of a connection between Hilton and SLH and SLH and the hotels. Hyatt bought Mr. and Mrs. Smith. You would think that they could handle this. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, right. And I was going to say a difference is they don't own the hotels, but SLH doesn't own their hotels either. So yeah, yeah, it totally should be doable. And so please just do it. But all right, do I think it's likely they'll do this? No, unfortunately, I don't think it's likely.

Here's something that might be easier for Hyatt to do. Very least, make it so that we can use our free night certificates with all of these partners. So we get free night certificates from our Chase credit cards. We get these category one through four just for having the World of Hyatt card. We get them from all kinds of different Hyatt promotions, like the brand explorer thing, where if you stay at five different brands, you get them. We get them from milestone rewards as we go up the – every 10 nights, starting at 20 nights, there's different milestone rewards. And a few different ones you could get free night certificates. First ones are Category 1 through 4.

Later on, you could start getting category one to seven. And even much, much later than that, you could get the ultimate one, which is good even for category one through eight. But as things stand today, not good for Mr. and Mrs. Smith or any of these other partnerships. So here's what I want you to do. I think it's pretty simple. Let us redeem them as if they're points. So like if we had a category one to four certificate and we want to book a Mr. and Mrs. Smith property that costs 22,000 points for the night, tell us that the category one through four is worth 15,000 points and that we can add 7,000 points to that and book the Mr. and Mrs. Smith property. It still doesn't give us like outsized value for our redemption, but it gives us a way that we

could use these awards that are supposed to be, you know, except for the credit card one, there's supposed to be awards that we're getting as for our loyalty, you know, to, you know, give us something that we'll value because to show that you value us as loyal members and yet, as things stand today, you're not letting us use them at all at the vast majority of the properties that are under your umbrella

because of the way you treat Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties. So do that, please. Yeah, and I wanna point out that Greg is being pretty generous to you, Hyatt, because that category one to four, he used the 15,000 point example in terms of the value because that's the standard award rate at a category four. But you know, the peak rate is 18,000. Not even asking for the full 18,000 points in maximum value here. He's asking for the 15,000 points of a standard award, which seems to me to be very reasonable. All right. So you heard it, Hyatt. Nick agrees with my solution. So, and you know what? If you want to do both of my proposed solutions, we're okay with that too. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, it would be great to be able to do that. Like Greg said, a lot of these things are awards that you earn for your loyalty.

It'd be nice to get that same loyalty in return. And again, I mean, let's be clear. Greg and I both love Hyatt and there's a lot of things to love about Hyatt. We just think that this is an area that really needs to get fixed. Fix it. Please. Don't forget, if you've enjoyed this

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