Quick hit: Hyatt Milestone 2K Next Stay Awards don't stack, but do post on award stays

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I’ve been plugging along earning top-tier Hyatt Globalist status through manufactured spend on the Chase World of Hyatt credit card, and recently hit the 30-night and 40-night milestones in quick succession. With no obvious reason to choose the other options, I selected the 2K Next Stay Award for each milestone.

As long-time readers may remember, I used to live in Madison, WI, and return several times a year to visit old friends there. I usually stay at the Hyatt Place Madison/Downtown, a Category 3 property that costs 9,000-15,000 World of Hyatt points per night. At the lower end of that range, that’s a terrific value for World of Hyatt points transferred from Chase Ultimate Rewards. At the higher end, it’s a great value for Category 1-4 Free Night Certificates earned on the Chase World of Hyatt credit card.

What I didn’t know was whether both my 2K Next Stay Awards would be triggered by a single stay. Fortunately, I had two stays planned (with the week in between spent on Madeline Island, the largest of Lake Superior’s Apostle Islands).

As it turned out, each of the two stays triggered a single 2K Next Stay Award. This ended up working fine for me given my travel plans, but the awards do have expiration policies to be aware of: they have to be selected (the other options at each of the 20-night and 30-night milestones are two club access awards and $25 FIND experience credits) and then used within the specified time periods, so unless you already have plans to visit a Hyatt House or Hyatt Place, or a property with a club, there’s no point in selecting your awards prematurely. Just set a calendar reminder to make sure you pick something!

Finally, note that the 2K Next Stay Awards did post on both my stays, despite being booked entirely with points and free night awards. This wasn’t surprising (Hyatt treats award stays as “eligible stays” for virtually all their promotions) but it was important to me to verify and pass along.

At the 40-night and 50-night Milestone levels I assume I’ll pick the 5,000 bonus point awards unless I see suite availability for an uncoming trip; I can use the free Guest of Honor award at the 40-night level to get club access if an upcoming stay has a club, although that’s not typical for the domestic properties I stay at.

How much is World of Hyatt credit card spend towards Globalist status worth?

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It sounds like a cliche because it is, but World of Hyatt points are virtually the only loyalty currency to have retained a large part of their value in the years since I started travel hacking. This only sounds controversial because they have, in fact, lost so much value, especially at the very highest end: the most expensive stays at the top 10 or 15 properties have increased in price from 22,000 World of Hyatt points to 45,000 points during their “peak” booking windows.

That still consistently makes Hyatt stays the most valuable redemptions almost everywhere they operate, and I rarely see redemptions worth less than 3 or 4 cents per point.

This is, however, not a ringing endorsement of putting unbonused spend on Chase’s co-branded World of Hyatt credit cards, because those cards are not the best method of earning World of Hyatt points on unbonused spend.

Chase offers the same or higher Hyatt earning in all spending categories

The Chase World of Hyatt personal and business cards offer 2 World of Hyatt points per dollar spent on a range of categories:

  • Restaurants

  • Airline tickets

  • Transit and commuting

  • Fitness clubs and gym memberships

  • Shipping

  • Car rentals

  • Gas stations

  • Internet, cable, and phone bills

Unfortunately, Chase also offers cards that earn bonus Ultimate Rewards points in each of these categories, points that can be instantly transferred to Hyatt. In other words, no matter how highly you value World of Hyatt points, it’s extremely unlikely that one of their co-branded credit cards is worth carrying purely for the earning opportunities in any of the bonus categories.

Even on unbonused spend, the Chase Freedom Unlimited and Ink Unlimited cards earn 50% more points than the same spend put on a World of Hyatt credit card.

What is unbonused spend towards Hyatt milestones and status worth?

The World of Hyatt credit card comes with 5 qualifying night credits every year, and earns an additional 2 qualifying nights for each $5,000 spent on the card (regardless of category), and those qualifying nights count towards “Milestone Rewards.” Here’s a simplified breakdown of the results of your spending at different levels on the personal card (the business card has a slightly more generous status earning structure but does not offer the 5 free qualifying nights):

  • $40,000 (20 qualifying nights): 2,000 bonus points

  • $65,000 (30 nights): Category 1-4 award (up to 18,000 points) and 2,000 bonus points

  • $90,000 (40 nights): 5,000 bonus points

  • $115,000 (50 nights): 5,000 bonus points

  • $140,000 (60 nights): Category 1-7 award (up to 35,000 points)

  • $165,000 (70 nights): 10,000 bonus points

  • $190,000 (80 nights): 10,000 bonus points

  • $215,000 (90 nights): 10,000 bonus points

  • $240,000 (100 nights): Category 1-7 award and 10,000 bonus points

As you can see, there are basically only 2 relevant “hinge points" (in addition to the Category 1-4 award granted at $15,000 in annual spend): at $65,000 in spend you get a boost of up to 18,000 points, and at $140,000 in spend you get an additional boost of up to 35,000 points. Combined with the earlier milestone awards, at exactly $140,000 in unbonused spend you will earn a total of up to 207,000 points in value, or 1.48 points per dollar.

This is, of course, virtually identical to the 210,000 Ultimate Rewards points that you’d earn putting the same spend on a Freedom Unlimited or Ink Unlimited card, which could be transferred instantly to World of Hyatt, with the added caveat that the value of the 30-night and 60-night bonuses is contingent on redeeming the awards at the most expensive eligible properties.

Note that milestone rewards continue after 60 nights, all the way up to 150 nights. At $240,000 in spend, you’ll earn up to 417,000 points in value, or 1.74 points per dollar.

How valuable is Globalist status?

Even if the marginal unbonused dollar is better spent on a card earning 1.5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar than 1 World of Hyatt point per dollar, it would still be possible to get enough value from reaching spend thresholds on the World of Hyatt card to justify allocating the spend there instead, if you valued Globalist status highly enough and were confident enough that you’d reach it, or wanted to use the goal of Globalist status as a kind of commitment device.

Like all elite status, Globalist status is more valuable the more you stay with Hyatt, and it also requires fewer shenanigans like this the more you stay with them. If you stayed 25 nights per year with Hyatt, then the 5 free nights that come with the personal card would get you to 30-night Explorist status, and the $15,000 in spend to trigger the annual free night certificate would get you to 36 nights. After that, just $60,000 in additional spend ($75,000 in total spend) would result in Globalist status, 10,000 bonus points, and a free night certificate worth up to 35,000 points, a total of roughly 1.75 points per dollar on unbonused spend.

The most frequently cited benefits of Globalist status are free breakfast or club access and suite upgrade awards, although the latter is no longer strictly a benefit for Globalists, since you can request them instead of points at the 40-night and 50-night milestones.

I’ve had some awe-inspiring buffets at Park Hyatts and some soggy eggs at Hyatt Regencies, so for simplicity I consider your average hotel breakfast to be worth about $15-20. Over the 25 nights our hypothetical travel hacker actually spends with Hyatt, I’d call that around $400, multiplied by the number of people you usually travel with.

Suite upgrade awards can be terrific, but only if you can use them, which is notoriously difficult. Part of that is the games properties play to restrict availability, but I don’t doubt that elites really are trying to use them at the same properties at the same times. I’ve used suite upgrade awards for wonderful suites at superb properties but I would still not put a speculative value on them. My usual advice is simply to try to use them on every stay, in case you get lucky and there’s space, instead of hanging on to them for the perfect situation. If that situation does come along and you’re out of awards, you can probably just buy, borrow, or beg for somebody else’s.

In other words, Globalist status itself, excluding the awards that are easily convertible into points values, is only worth $400-$1,600 to someone spending 25 nights a year at Hyatts.

Conclusion

The reason I started by talking about bonused spend is that I don’t want to give the impression that you should begin thinking about travel hacking with unbonused spend. On the contrary, I’m fond of saying that actual purchases, many of which will inevitably be unbonused, should be a rounding error in your miles and points earning strategy.

On the other hand, large unbonused spend opportunities do come along in everyday life: some schools and coaches accept credit cards for tuition and fees, car dealers may allow you to pay for part of your down payment with a credit card, etc. When it comes to a $2 cup of coffee I couldn’t care less what card I pay with. But a $60,000 tuition bill is a valuable enough situation to take seriously as an earning opportunity.

If it can get you most or all of the way to Globalist status, the World of Hyatt credit card might be competitive with a Freedom Unlimited or 2% cash back card. I tell most people the best choice for unbonused spend is a 2.625% cash back card with Bank of America Preferred Rewards Platinum Honors status, but the fact is that combination isn’t available to very many people, either because they don’t have $100,000 in liquid assets or they have a more valuable use for it than parking it at Bank of America for three months.

Combining Ultimate Rewards points, transferring Hyatt points, and Hyatt booking follies

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Today’s post is a bit of an information dump, but it combines a number of issues I’ve been working through to get my trips booked for this spring and summer and that I haven’t seen covered clearly anywhere else online.

Combining Chase Ultimate Rewards points

For those of us with multiple Ultimate Rewards-earning credit cards, combining points between our own accounts is routine: earn 5 points per dollar in a quarterly bonus category, like this quarter’s grocery store bonus category on the Chase Freedom, then transfer those points to a card that allows for transfer to Chase’s travel partners or higher-value Ultimate Rewards travel portal redemptions.

But what about combining points between new household members or employees? It’s possible, but there are a few important things you need to know.

First, combining points is always done from the “sender’s” side. There’s no way to “request” points, or “pool” points held in multiple card accounts. Each sender Ultimate Rewards account has to initiate a non-reversible transfer to a “receiver” account.

Second, adding a new receiver account can no longer be done online; you’ll need to call the number on the back of your Ultimate Rewards-earning credit card and provide the recipient’s credit card number. Since my flexible Ultimate Rewards card is a business card, in my case I chose to have my sender add one of my non-flexible Freedom cards as the receiver card. I was then able to instantly convert those non-flexible points into flexible Ultimate Rewards in my legacy Ink Plus account.

Finally, senders are only allowed to add “one member of your household or owner of the company, as applicable” as recipients.

There’s a lot to unpack here. Most importantly, it means that you should not set up you and your partner as mutual recipients, since this would use up the recipient slots of each household member. Instead, it would be ideal to keep the receiver’s recipient slot open to add an additional recipient. In this way, points could be moved and consolidated in larger and larger numbers across multiple Ultimate Rewards accounts before being transferred to a single travel partner account.

Additionally, it suggests the possible value of keeping your flexible Ultimate Rewards accounts attached to separate Chase online accounts. The logic here is that while you want to preserve the flexibility of your own Ultimate Rewards points, you also may want to have more than one household transfer target, so if you have, for example, a Chase Sapphire Preferred or Reserve and a flexible Chase Ink product, you could attach separate recipient targets to each online account.

I have not experimented with this extensively, but wanted to alert readers to some interesting possibilities they can explore further for themselves.

Chase World of Hyatt point transfers are no longer instant

Transfers from Ultimate Rewards to World of Hyatt used to be immediate: log out and log back in and your balance was already updated. Regrettably, no more. I submitted a transfer on the evening of Thursday, February 17, and my points didn’t land in my World of Hyatt account until the morning of Saturday, February 19. It wasn’t the end of the world, but since I wasn’t aware of the new delay, it certainly kept me awake for a couple nights frantically refreshing my Hyatt account.

On the one hand, if you’re planning a trip weeks or months in advance, you have nothing to worry about; your points will probably arrive in plenty of time. On the other hand, if you’re frantically booking a last minute stay, don’t count on immediate Chase transfers for your Hyatt redemptions.

Member-to-member Hyatt points transfer timing

World of Hyatt, like Hilton Honors, allows members to transfer points between each other for free using the Point combining request form. For an upcoming stay, I submitted the form on Saturday, February 19. I received an immediate automated response, and the transfer was finally completed on the following Friday, February 25.

So if you’re planning to combine points in order to book an award, give yourself plenty of time to allow the transfer to go through.

Hyatt award booking chaos

Of course, combining Ultimate Rewards points, transferring them to World of Hyatt, then combining them in another member’s account aren’t done for fun. They’re done to book Hyatt awards, and this is where I ran into the truly stupefying and genuinely serious consequences of Hyatt’s new award charts and booking system.

It’s worth reminding readers of two facts:

  1. World of Hyatt properties are still defined by category;

  2. Within each category, award nights are charged at either an “off-peak,” “standard,” or “peak” rate.

This has the key corollary that a Category 1-4 free night certificate is worth 50% more on a Category 4 “peak” day than on a Category 4 “off-peak” day, saving 18,000 points instead of 12,000 points.

Now let’s get to the chaos. When booking a multi-night stay, World of Hyatt will only show you the rate available on the first night of the stay, even if the property moves from “standard” to “peak” during the stay.

To find out the nightly award rate, you have to view the property’s “Points Calendar.” Here’s the calendar for the Hyatt Place New York City / Times Square:

In this case, trying to search for a 2-night award stay will show that standard nights are available “from” 17,000 points per night.

But unless you have enough points in your World of Hyatt account to book the reservation, it will not show you the final price of 37,000 World of Hyatt points, which might lead you to transfer 34,000 Ultimate Rewards points instead, and then find out to your horror you’d run out of time to book the award.

Finally, and most egregiously, in order for award availability to appear online, the exact same room type has to be available for every night of your stay.

Putting it all together

You’ve made it this far so I don’t want to make you do any more homework and I’ll put the pieces together for you. When planning a Hyatt award and transferring Ultimate Rewards points, take the following steps in this order:

  1. Find the property you want to stay at and click the “Points Calendar” button

This will allow you to see the award rate for every night of your planned stay. Add those rates together and you will get the total cost of your stay.

2. Check standard award availability for your entire stay. Plug your hotel and dates into Hyatt and it will show you whether there is standard award availability in a single room type for your entire stay (although it will miscalculate the total cost of your stay if award rates vary by night). If so: congratulations! Transfer the required number of Ultimate Rewards points you calculated in Step 1 to Hyatt and hope the space is still available when the transfer is completed.

3. If standard award availability isn’t available for your entire stay, don’t despair. It may be the available room types simply shift during your stay. Now comes the boring part: check each day of your stay individually for standard award availability, and book “clusters” of nights in each room type. For example, standard award availability might be available in a two queen room for 2 nights, a one king room for 2 nights, and an accessible king room for 1 night. Book them each separately.

4. If necessary, call the hotel and ask to stay in the same room for your entire stay across all your reservations. They might not accommodate you, depending on the circumstances, but moving your crap around a single hotel is a lot easier than moving between hotels, which I’m not too proud to confess I’ve done more than once over the years.

How bad would a Hyatt devaluation need to be?

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I’ve been following with interest the changes Hyatt has made to certain types of award reservations. To roughly summarize the changes:

  • points can now be redeemed for “premium” suite award nights;

  • Points + Cash can now be redeemed for standard and premium suites;

  • qualifying paid stays can now be upgraded to premium suites with points;

  • the cash co-pay on Points + Cash stays is now 50% of the “standard” room rate for the room type you’re booking instead of a fixed amount based on hotel category;

  • a new 40,000-point redemption tier will be introduced to cover certain newly-acquired luxury properties.

I’m frankly not sure if it was part of this update or not, but I also noticed recently that award nights at Hyatt Ziva and Zilara all-inclusive properties can now be booked online (you used to have to call to book).

Hyatt is a competitive program for travel hackers

If you earn miles and points mostly or exclusively through manufactured spend this shouldn’t come as surprise, but to break it down simply:

  • a Category 1 Hyatt property costs 5,000 points per night, or $3,333 in spend on a Chase Freedom Unlimited or $1,000 on a Chase Ink Cash or Ink Plus at office supply stores;

  • a Category 4 Hyatt property costs 15,000 points per night, or $10,000 in spend on a Freedom Unlimited or $3,000 in spend on Ink Cash or Plus;

  • a top-tier Category 7 property costs 30,000 points per night, or $20,000 on Freedom Unlimited or $6,000 on Ink Cash or Plus.

We can break down Hilton’s award chart in the same way:

  • a bottom-tier Hilton property costs 5,000 points per night, or $833 in grocery store or gas station spend on an American Express Ascend card;

  • a mid-tier Hilton property costs 50,000 points per night, or $8,333 in bonused spend;

  • and a top-tier Hilton property costs 95,000 points, or $15,833 in bonused spend.

(Note that since grocery store spend costs about 50% more than in-person unbonused spend, the out-of-pocket costs for the same spot on the Hilton award chart end up being somewhat more expensive than Hyatt).

This is what I mean by a “competitive” program: Hyatt properties won’t always be cheaper than Hilton properties in a specific city or on particular dates, but having access to both programs gives you a better chance of paying as little as possible for the trips you want to take than relying solely on one program or the other and being stuck paying cash when it fails you.

Likewise, having credit cards that are useful for unbonused spend, office supply store spend, and grocery store spend means you’re able to take advantage of more promotions and opportunities, instead of relying on a single merchant or bonus category.

That brings me to today’s topic.

How bad would a Hyatt devaluation need to be to make the program uncompetitive?

I think it’s useful to think through questions like this ahead of time, so you don’t fall into the trap of motivated reasoning once a devaluation actually happens (something credit card affiliate bloggers are especially vulnerable to, but a risk for anyone).

You can imagine multiple forms a Hyatt devaluation might take:

  • Hyatt could change or end their transfer relationship with Chase. This is the least likely situation in the short term since Chase loudly promotes its uniform transfer ratio, but there’s no natural law that says Hyatt will remain a Chase partner forever, or that Chase will never revamp the Ultimate Rewards program.

  • Hyatt could introduce higher award categories and steadily shift properties upwards. Hyatt told Pizza in Motion that they have “no plans for any Hyatt-branded hotels or resorts to move to a new Category 8,” but all that wording requires is that the Park Hyatt sign come down and be replaced with a Small Luxury Hotels of the World or Joie de Vivre sign. No Hyatt branding? No problem.

  • Hyatt could restrict award space or introduce dynamic pricing. This is in many ways the most likely or even inevitable form a devaluation will take, since Hilton has had dynamic pricing for years and Marriott will launch it in 2019. 30,000-point properties might limit their availability to a few low-season weeks per year, while mid-tier properties might cost a few thousand points less for part of the year and tens of thousands of points more when people actually want to visit.

A change to the relationship with Chase would be the most catastrophic from a travel hacker’s point of view. Changing the transfer ratio or perhaps capping annual points transfers would make Hyatt a truly niche program, still worthwhile under specific conditions but uncompetitive with Hilton or even Radisson Rewards, which has US Bank co-branded credit cards that still earn 5 points per dollar on unbonused spend and a much larger footprint than Hyatt.

Meanwhile, category inflation isn’t the end of the world as long as the Chase relationship remains the same, although eventually you might see your favorite properties inflated out of eligibility for annual credit card free night certificates (currently good at Category 1-4 properties).

Conclusion

There should be no question in your mind that something will eventually give in the World of Hyatt program, and this post isn’t about predicting whether or not it will happen — it definitely will. There has to be enough money to go around between Chase, Hyatt, and Hyatt’s owner-operators, and a fixed credit card earning ratio and fixed award chart are simply incompatible with that. I don’t know which piece will buckle first under the pressure, but the transmission mechanism between Chase Ultimate Rewards, World of Hyatt, and award availability and price will change because it has to change.

The point of this post is to encourage you to think in advance about what kinds of changes would make you walk away from the program, or at least radically reduce your dependence on it. How bad would the transfer ratio have to become? How hard would it have to be to find award availability? How low would your typical redemption value have to fall?

If you don’t think about it in advance, then when the devaluations do start to roll in and you’re bombarded with affiliate bloggers explaining how “it’s not really that bad,” you’re not going to be ready to tell if they’re right or not.