It’s been a few hours since Hyatt’s award chart changes went live, so it’s now possible to start getting a gauge on quite how bad—or not—these changes have been.
Based on a relatively small sample size, I’m (in a mild way) pleasantly surprised so far by what I’ve seen. While there are inevitable increases for some nights, there are more nights than I was expecting where pricing has either stayed the same or dropped.
I took screenshots last night of award pricing at a number of popular Hyatt properties, then did the same again today in order to be able to do a before and after side-by-side comparison. I picked hotels that are in different categories and looked at pricing in different months in order to get a better sense of how the award chart changes are being implemented.
As a reminder before we proceed, here’s what award pricing will look like from now on for a standard room:
Grand Hyatt Hong Kong
July 2026 pricing before award chart changes:
July 2026 pricing after award chart changes:
This property is one of the examples where the results are better than I’d expected. The Grand Hyatt Hong Kong is a category 6 property and July previously had a mix of off-peak (21K points) and standard (25K points) award nights.
I’d expected the standard nights to map across to ‘Moderate’ pricing which is the middle tier of pricing, thus would be 30K points per night. However, that hasn’t happened; all the standard nights in July have been mapped across to ‘Low’ pricing which means they’ve remained exactly the same at 25K points per night.
The off-peak awards meanwhile have mapped to ‘Lowest’, so they’ve dropped slightly from 21K points per night to 20K.
Grand Hyatt Kauai
January 2027 pricing before award chart changes:
January 2027 pricing after award chart changes:
The Grand Hyatt Kauai is a very popular Hyatt property and, having stayed there in December 2024, it’s not hard to se why. It’s a beautiful property in a great location with excellent service.
You’ll sadly have to pay more for that privilege now though. When checking pricing for January 2027 before the award chart changes, there was a mix of standard and peak pricing. On the plus side, standard pricing that month has been mapped across to ‘Low’ in the new chart rather than ‘Moderate’, while peak dates have mapped across to ‘Moderate’ rather than ‘Upper’ or ‘Top’. That’s where the good news ends though, because prices have still risen for those dates by 5K or 10K per night.
You might notice that there’s a difference in award availability for January between the before and after screenshots. I don’t think Hyatt has reduced availability at this property following the award chart changes; instead, I suspect it’s that this hotel was a popular option for people making bookings late last night after I’d taken these screenshots.
Hyatt Centric The Liberties Dublin
December 2026 pricing before award chart changes:
December 2026 pricing after award chart changes:
This is a great hotel in the heart of Dublin’s Golden Triangle whiskey district. My wife and I stayed there in the past and we’re hoping to visit again in a few months. I was therefore curious what pricing would look like post-changes and picked the month of December which, admittedly, isn’t necessarily a wonderful month to visit Ireland weather-wise.
The Hyatt Centric is a category 5 hotel and had a mix of off-peak, standard, and peak pricing for December. Those dates appear to have mapped across to Lowest, Low, and Moderate respectively which is probably the best that could be hoped for.
That means that dates that were formerly off-peak are now slightly cheaper (17K versus 15K), standard dates are the same (20K), and peak dates are slightly more expensive (23K versus 25K). If you’re looking to visit in December and have some flexibility with your stay dates, you’d actually be able to redeem fewer points now than you would previously if you pick the ‘Lowest’ dates.
Hyatt Place Sterling-Dulles Airport-North
November 2026 pricing before award chart changes:
November 2026 pricing after award chart changes:
I picked this property to compare pricing because it’s one of an ever-decreasing selection of category 1 Hyatt hotels in the US. I picked November partly because it could be a good option if you need an end-of-year mattress run to earn Globalist status and partly because there were numerous days that month that were previously off-peak and so were formerly only 3,500 points per night.
I thought Hyatt might map those nights over to ‘Low’ pricing, thereby making them 4,500 points per night, but that’s not happened: formerly off-peak dates were mapped to ‘Lowest’ which means their pricing decreased to 3K points per night.
Standard nights that month mapped to ‘Low’ which meant those too dropped by 500 points per night from 5K to 4,500, while peak nights also dropped 500 points as they mapped from peak (6,500) to ‘Moderate’ (6K). All-in-all, very good news. I haven’t checked to see if that’s the case for every single month, but for November at least it’s positive. I did glance at December’s pricing and saw that there were many 3K nights available that month too.
Hyatt Regency Paris Étoile
February 2027 pricing before award chart changes:
February 2027 pricing after award chart changes:
If you’d like to visit the City of Love (and the City of Light) in the month of Valentine’s Day, award pricing at the Hyatt Regency Paris Étoile is pretty good, although Valentine’s Day is already booked up.
Award nights for February 2027 were previously all off-peak or standard. Off-peak has mapped to ‘Lowest’ and so, similar to the Hyatt Centric Dublin The Liberties, has dropped from 17K per night to 15K. Standard nights mapped to ‘Low’, so those have remained at 20K.
Hyatt Ziva Cancun
March 2027 pricing before award chart changes:
March 2027 pricing after award chart changes:
Hyatt has been increasing its all-inclusive portfolio in recent years, so I figured it’d be worth checking pricing for at least one of their all-inclusives.
The Hyatt Ziva Cancun was at peak pricing for the entirety of the month of March, so 58K points per night previously. Thankfully Hyatt has mapped those dates to ‘Moderate’ rather than ‘Upper’ or ‘Top’, but it nonetheless means pricing has increased to 65K points per night.
Thompson Central Park New York
October 2026 pricing before award chart changes:
October 2026 pricing after award chart changes:
Last but not least, here’s a comparison for the Thompson Central Park New York. Pricing was previously at peak rates for the entirety of the month of October 2026. Once again, Hyatt has mapped that to the middle of the road ‘Moderate’ rate rather than ‘Upper’ or ‘Top’, but also once again that’s nonetheless led to an increase in pricing, albeit only going up from 29K points per night to 30K.
Other thoughts
Based on what I’ve seen so far, this is about as good as we could’ve hoped for. It looks like in many cases Hyatt has mapped things across so that pricing is still somewhat similar to before, even if it means that hotels that were previously at peak pricing are now at ‘Moderate’ rather than ‘Upper’ or ‘Top’. At the lower end, in all the instances of hotels that previously had off-peak pricing that I looked at, those have mapped to ‘Lowest’ rather than ‘Low’ which means that pricing for those nights has dropped a little.
As mentioned earlier, the examples above are just a small sample size. I’ve checked pricing for my existing reservations and in most cases the pricing is either the same or slightly lower; in the latter instance, Hyatt will proactively be giving a points rebate for the difference. In one or two cases the pricing would slightly increase if I was to rebook which seems to be because those dates that were formerly standard have mapped over to moderate.
Needless to say though, YMMV depending on which properties you’re looking at and which dates you want to stay. I imagine there’ll be numerous properties where pricing has increased compared to before.
While the implementation of these changes is (sort of) good news for now, it does give Hyatt a lot of leeway for jacking up prices in the future by moving nights up by one or more pricing tiers. For example, by making many formerly peak nights Moderate, it gives them the flexibility to move those up to Upper or Top. If that does happen, that’ll have a big impact on the value that can be achieved in the World of Hyatt program.
For now though, I’m counting my blessings that the changes that I’ve seen so far represent a tremor rather than a seismic shift.
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I was able to rebook a Cat 2 property I booked last night and save 500 points. You see the current price when you look at your bookings but when you look at Points Activity you can see how much you spent on a given property.
It’s worth checking your upcoming stays to see if you have save a few points. All of my other bookings this year were the same or went up.
Thanks for mentioning this. I too, seem to notice this and found the prior price I paid by looking at my prior points activity. Although the “devaluation” is not as bad as I had feared (I don’t often stay at top tier hotels), Boo on Hyatt for not automatically refunding the points for hotels that went down in cost BUT did NOT change their hotel category. Yes, Hyatt said that hotels that change categories if the hotel point cost is lower they would automatically refund your points to cover the difference, but apparently they did not do this for hotels that went down but did NOT change its category.
If you can write code to automatically refund points for those that change categories and go down, you could have done the same for those that did not change category!!!
Did Frequent Miler think all the changes would come at once?
We all know Hyatt will likely introduce the changes gradually to soften the impact.
Yeah probably need to circle back after a few days at least.
Made three bookings prior to the devaluation: 7Pines Ibiza in August, Zoetry Los Cabos in late October, and Grand Hyatt Kauai in January (4-5 nights each). Ibiza- no change, Los Cabos- up 10k points, Kauai up 50k points. Spent about 500k in Hyatt points, the changes resulted in a slightly more than 10% increase in required points if rebooked. Not too bad, but lots of variability.
It seems property specific. High end hotels are definitely taking advantage. PH Beaver creek has several 75,000 point nights proving to be a 67% increase.
I can’t be the only one sick of the rules constantly changing? I don’t wanna play this game anymore, it’s rigged
Hi, based on past experiences, when should we expect to see points differences rebates?
I did some spot checks and most of my properties stayed the same especially for bookings in 2027.
That said, based on how many Hyatt system issues were happening yesterday and during this transition, I imagine many properties (esp those that don’t have a big rev management team) will probably take time to update their rates.
If Hyatt didn’t mandate hotels to do this ahead of time, I expect a bell curve distribution of those that had their updates queued in the system and then some that might take months to update.
So if you didn’t book properties, missed the cutoff date, or are still planning some trips and see good rates, I’d book sooner rather than later.
My HR Lisbon booking went up by 67 – 113% (15K -> 32K, 12K -> 20K). Glad i was able to solidify my plans when i did! (Admittedly, it went up from Cat 4 to Cat 5.)
I looked at the Andaz in NYC and its a bloodbath. Rates have significantly increased. I have a feeling most other high end properties are similar. Your analysis doesn’t look at any Park Hyatts. I’d definitely be interested to see how bad these aspirational bookings are now.
That’s what I had found myself by anecdotally comparing a few “before vs after” at upcoming speculative bookings I had made.
This had felt likely to be something of a 10-40% devaluation of Hyatt Points. But from my anecdotal observations, it would have only cost me ~5% more on my 3 bookings (of 10 nights total. 2 of the bookings were unchanged in rates, and the 3rd booking had some-but-not-all of the nights increase from 35k to 45k).
Made 12 bookings yesterday, all in the USA, category 2-6, all 2-3 months out
10 remained the same price today
1 went up 5.2%
1 went down 7.7%
I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what’s happened to the Cat 2 I stay at frequently. That said, how certain are we that these prices won’t change? Is the plan for the next price shift to be in March/April of 2027, when the category shifts (normally) happen?
thats the whole point. we cant be certain. theres nothing to prevent from changing the proportion each year, so that eventually in 3-4 years, 80% of the time a property can be in the upper 2 bands
Good analysis.
All the properties I made sure to book before devaluation went up a ton, mostly due to peak travel timing:
GH Milan – 45k – 75k (september)
PH Kyoto – 9.5k – 15k (march)
HH Tokyo – 23k – 35k (march)
But a lot of the travel I have planned for late 2027 went down or stayed the same.
Cautiously optimistic about future value but we’re definitely losing the “aspirational” redemptions of top properties for low award pricing. Since I usually travel budget, this doesn’t impact my plans much.
PH Kyoto is 45k…
Lmao quite the typo, HP* not PH*
Is there even a grand hyatt milan? I tried to look it up, and I only see park hyatt lol
JFC I can’t type today apparently, PH* Milan
I need another coffee…
this was mostly expected. as you mentioned at the end, the minor changes now gives them a ton of room later to set everything at the higher end of the band without a further category change for a particular property. Just a slow, steady, continuous deval.