Hyatt announced some changes that will come into effect before the end of May. This will include a brand new award chart that splits the 8 categories into 5 pricing bands. You can read more about the new Hyatt overhauls here.
Breaking news: Hyatt takes us to the heartbreak hotel
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(00:51) – New award chart
(05:28) – Hyatt intends to maintain value and maintain an award chart
(17:24) – Bright spots
(27:08) – Does this change how we view our Hyatt points?
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Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie Yoder
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I guess the Hyatt rep must have talked a good talk to Nick. Because when you look at the new “award” chart, this definitely seems like an overly rosy outlook. Seems most likely we’re heading towards RRVs in line with Hyatt’s dynamic rates (around 1.4 cpp for now). As Tim suggests, they’ll probably gradually bring down the value in the first year. Anyway, we can always hope (but prepare by using up our point balances before May!).
Always enjoy Greg but great to have Tim sit in, appreciate his perspective
What happens with credit card free nights? Does that remain constant for a category 1-4 in terms of the points they will allow? Still no opportunity to increase point spend by a certain percentage like with IHG points?
Nothing will beat a 2 – 2.25c cash back card in future
It will be interesting to see how individual properties game the new system. They were already gaming it by for example only making a few rooms base level and standard suites.
If they didn’t want to make rooms available for rewards then, now that they have more leeway to set their own seasonality, and given how little properties are paid for award nights, I don’t see why any hotel that operates near capacity wouldn’t just put 100% of days at top season. I assume properties will get paid more by Hyatt for high season award bookings. So the only properties that wouldnt do this would be garbage properties that are half empty.
It was nice knowing you, Hyatt. I was an unprofitable customer for sure, so you probably won’t miss me much.
Just to clarify, individual properties don’t set their point cost, do they? You referenced “property-level” decisions on points cost and it’s always been my impression that Hyatt (and other major chains) reimburses properties for award stays based on occupancy and cash rate, not on the points price. So individual property owners (since Hyatt owns very few of the properties) have a big say in the cash rate (with input from Hyatt), but the property owner doesn’t care if the points cost is 5k or 55k for the night, since he/she is getting reimbursed the same regardless. Hyatt corporate cares about the points cost and the manner/cost in which they are redeemed given that points are a liability on their books, but Hyatt points don’t directly affect property-owners’ financials (only dollars from Hyatt or customers do).
This is my question as well: who’s assigning categories and category-in-category (level)? And — has the easy in which Hyatt reimburses the hotels changed.
In other words, who suffers when a redemption is “too low” and who benefits when a redemption is “too high”?
I thought I read in one of these posts that the category might be set by Hyatt but where the hotel wants to put rooms within the category (lowest, top, etc) is set locally.
Perhaps this is why Hyatt corporate was noncommittal about each hotel being required to have a certain number of “lowest” versus other awards. I can’t wait to see the charts showing the percentage of the year a given hotel has “lowest” rates available. I imagine some will be, if not zero, then low single digits.
Came here to comment on the same thing. The podcast pretty much states that the properties control the “bin” and Hyatt might “encourage” them to not play games, but Nick seemed to think it might be difficult to enforce. I actually think in 2026 this is very easy to enforce. If properties really get to control the bin for each day and Hyatt doesn’t want them to change the bin assignment “dynamically”, they just need to not give them the tools to do that.
But we also know from VFTW that Hyatt isn’t going to change reimbursements for the properties, so what would actually be the properties’ motivation to increase award rates on busy days? If they sell one room for $1000 and fill 100 rooms with award bookings, does it matter whether those award bookings cost 15k or 30k? (clearly it matters to Hyatt corporate)
Thank you – finally someone pointing this out! Very odd when this is framed as properties picking their pricing. Hyatt ultimately dictates the points levels, not the property. Don’t believe it if you are told otherwise. Given the way these programs are structured, if it was up to the property, they’d have tons of dates where it cost just 1 point to redeem! Hyatt obviously won’t allow that – their mandate is to be stewards of the WoH funds and have it be an economical program to the company.
I’ve worked for a franchisor before, and one project I’ll always remember was dealing a hotel owner who was complaining that the company had bumped his hotel’s points cost up 25%, and was imploring the company to lower it. They greatly feared the loss of occupancy that would cost the reimbursement dollars.
I posit Hyatt is going to peg hotels at having the points rate translating to a minimum of at least 1.6 cents (or 1.4 or pray for 1.8!).Cat 4 top of 25k = $400, cat 6 top of 40k = $640, cat 8 top of 75k = $1200. A system like this is how they’d be confident that hotels won’t always post top (unless they’d fill up at that rate anyways). They probably don’t want to say that part out loud because effectively that’d be an admittance of dynamic pricing.
Probably bc the post is still new, but the video is flagged as Private.
Same
Thanks for commenting. Fixed that!