Hyatt is getting a new CRM software, and will be moving their data from the current database to their new one. As a result they’re letting members know that Gold Passport systems will be down next Tuesday through Friday. But the details here are more significant than that.
[W]e wanted to let you know that from December 15 to December 18, 2015 we will be undergoing system maintenance and your account information will not be accessible during this time.
That means you — and Gold Passport representatives — will be unable to access your account. That means several days where there’s:
- No points redemptions (reward nights, upgrades, use points to pay for in-hotel charges)
- No promotional award redemptions (credit card signup and annual free nights, Diamond Suite Upgrades)
- No points transfers and purchases
So if you want to redeem points or awards, do it by Monday the 14th — or wait.
Awards can be redeemed for stays during this period of time of course. Points and stays will be accumulated, as well, they just won’t post to your account right away. In fact, they won’t even post when your account balance becomes available again:
Any account activity accrued after December 12, 2015 will not be reflected on your account until the week of December 28, 2015. You can be assured that any points earned during this time will be credited to your account.
So if you’re going to want to redeem your points before the end of the year and will need to top off your account to do so, you’re going to need to do it within the next week. Make any Chase transfers to Gold Passport now. You’ll be able to redeem points again December 19, but only out of your existing points balance (Hyatt has been willing to let Diamond members make reservations without sufficient points in an account — as long as they’re there prior to the actual award stay).
I’m hopeful that these dates are worst case scenarios, a desire to underpromise and overdeliver. Because it’s certainly longer than it took American to combine over 30 million US Airways Dividend Miles accounts onto the AAdvantage platform. So if they actually have systems unavailable, and points balances not updating, for this long they probably need a new IT director — and the additional functionality the systems upgrade gives them had better be an instance where the juice is worth the squeeze since it’s a real inconvenience to members.
new platform or not, as an IT professional I’d have a hard time keeping my job if I told upper mgmt that I need a system to be offline for 3 days. I just moved all major prod systems to a new data center across the country and had only a few hours of downtime. But then I was allowed to purchase new hardware and overall planning and migration processes took months of employee time, maybe Hyatt IT was stuck with tiny budgets for the project. Not impressive in today’s cheap hardware and offshore development teams world…
@sice – +1~
I’ve had heart palpitations when told my systems would be down “30 minutes – 2 hours” — @ 2am.
Three whole days – well, time for hyperbole: egregious, shocking, appalling, horrendous, outrageous, etc, et al…
Of course if it were DL, they would NOT give us notice, hide the whole exploit, and then claim they had “enhanced” some obscure “function” …
I totally get that IT is hard, but 3 days — I share your sentiment, they really should be aiming to underpromise and overdeliver!
@Sice
Totally agree with you here. I work for a prominent entertainment company that serves millions of customers on a shared platform and work daily with IT and online server engineers. We plan deployments, database updates, migrations, etc. We have had some bad downtimes and screw-ups, but never anything like 3 days. In this day and age, a 3 day downtime is unheard of; aside from the obvious loss of revenue, you’re going to erode brand affinity and drive customers to other platforms. It doesn’t matter how much you message something like this ahead in advance, you’re not going to reach everyone and customers will still be caught off-guard. I can’t view a 3 day downtime as anything other than a failure on Hyatt’s part.
Hyatt, hire better engineers.
“(Hyatt has been willing to let Diamond members make reservations without sufficient points in an account — as long as they’re there prior to the actual award stay).”
They haven’t done this for awhile. Last year I was able to book P+C stays ahead of earning the points, but this year has been points up front, even for Diamond members.