In the long Flyertalk thread speculating on the upcoming launch of the Hyatt Visa from Chase, a Flyertalk member decided to just type in the URL www.mychasecreditcards.com/hyatt and it came up. So it appears the offer is now live. And no doubt it’ll be widely promoting starting today (or at latest tomorrow).

Sadly the offer is a bit less exciting than some had expected.

First, some surveys of potential benefits in advance of the launch led folks to think that the benefits would be myriad and generous. My own hope was for the ability to use Diamond confirmed suite upgrades on award of promotional free night stays. Expectations were set quite high, though not directly by Hyatt or Chase — really just by swirling speculatins that was mostly set by..

Second, Hyatt has been so darned aggressive with their promotions over the past year and a half that any time they fail to offer confirmed suites at the Park Hyatt Vendome or Park Hyatt Tokyo, they now seem somewhat blase’. Except…

For some, the card apparently does offer free confirmed suites at those properties! Stay with me here!

The card offers one Hyatt point per dollar spent, 3 Hyatt Gold Passport points per dollar spent at Hyatt, Platinum status, and no foreign currency transaction fees.

There’s a two free night signup bonus after first purchase. Those nights are valid at any Hyatt in the world and have to be used within a year of issue. It’s reported on Flyertalk that those free nights will be confirmed suite nights for Diamond members.

So contra Lucky, who hadn’t seen any special benefit for Diamond members carrying the card (just a function of reporting early and beating me to the punch!), it looks like there will be an incremental benefit to Diamond members who get the card.

The annual fee for the card will be $75, and the one-time two free nights are certainly worth that. It isn’t going to likely be the ‘killer app’ that will cause me to put away my Starwood American Express, but I didn’t actually expect that a Visa product would be — the interchange fees are simply lower on a Visa than an American Express, there’s less money available to rebate to consumers as an incentive to choose the card.

What’s interesting to me is that the benefits here are similar to the new Priority Club card from Chase. It seems that Chase consumer surveys are driving benefit selection across their brands. That one comes with a free night annually, in addition to points. This one does a couple free nights at signup as opposed to points. Both do no foreign currency transaction fees, so their research must show that as really popular with potential cardholders. I know it will be for me, I’m going to wait a little while just to see if there are better signup offers that come up, but I do expect to pick up this card and it’ll certainly be my go to card when traveling internationally (and of course for Hyatt spend).

They haven’t ‘backed the truck up’ on this one — at least unless and until they improve the bonuses, which they still may since I havne’t seen them publicly launching it yet — but they do seem to have introduced a solid card.

And funny thing, that’s actually consistent with expectations. It’s what Randy Petersen told me they’d be doing back in April, but sometimes we travelers can get a little bit over-excited and wrapped up in what could be.