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Chase announced yesterday that they had renewed their agreement to issue the Hyatt Credit Card.
Crucially, the deal also ensures that Hyatt will remain a Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer partner and that transfers will continue 1:1.
World of Hyatt will continue as a point transfer partner through Chase’s premier rewards program, which allows for Ultimate Rewards points to be transferred at full 1:1 value. This means one Chase Ultimate Rewards point is equal to one World of Hyatt point. Eligible Chase credit cardholders can redeem points for stays at more than 700 Hyatt properties in 56 countries worldwide.
So points from the Chase Sapphire Preferred Card, the Ink Business Preferred Credit Card and more will continue to transfer to Hyatt as well as to United, Southwest, and British Airways — all co-brand deals that Chase has recently re-upped — as well as their other transfer partners.
Most though not all of Chase’s transfer partners are programs where Chase also issues a co-brand credit card. That’s not the case for Singapore Airlines Krisflyer, Virgin Atlantic Flying Club, or Air France KLM Flying Blue. But many international programs are excited about even a small piece of the US credit card market via transfer partners because credit card deals aren’t nearly as lucrative in their home markets.
Chase issues the Marriott Rewards Premier Credit Card and has been a Marriott partner for years but with Marriott’s acquisition of Starwood and American Express’ need to aggressively protect its Starwood portfolio there’s a lot of money at stake figuring out how to stay in the game in that hotel space going forward.
Now that Hyatt’s future is secure with Chase for some period of time — traditionally co-brand deals were five years, increasingly they’re written for seven, but the length of this deal wasn’t announced — we’ll have to see whether new features and benefits are introduced to the product, something that would have been on hold up until now.
Hyatt tells me that “while the new deal doesn’t get to level of specific benefits, we are currently doing some research to help inform if/how the card should evolve.”
Hopefully the deal will include something more than lowest level status for Hyatt cardholders. You wouldn’t go and get a Marriott card if it got you silver status.
I personally hope that they never add a higher elite level to the card. At least not just for having it. Status should be earned for loyalty to the hotel brand. If you give it away with a cc, you will just have a bunch of people who are just using their points earned on purchases and getting all the perks.
@Mike – I disagree with you. A higher level of status will help drive users to your brand. I think the difficulty with Hyatt is they have a smaller footprint in the states.