As I understand it, in the coming days Hyatt Gold Passport will be announcing that effective March 16 members will lose the ability to earn miles with Aeroplan, Alaska Airlines, Frontier, and US Airways for their hotel stays and also the ability to transfer points into miles with these airlines.

While the announcement of these changes have not been made yet, apparently a website detailing them is up early.

This isn’t a huge loss, Aeroplan gutted its award chart last year and then began adding fuel surcharges to awards, taking a once great frequent flyer program and making it mediocre at best (though its online booking tool is pretty good). Frontier is, well, one of the weakest programs in North America.

Personally I will miss the opportunity to earn US Airways miles, at least during the annual Grand Slam promotion. Cheap one-night stays are often better to credit to miles than to points, I credited a cheap one-night stay that would have earned less than 1000 Gold Passport points and earned a fixed 500 US Airways miles and a Grand Slam hit instead. And of course points transfers from Hyatt counted as a separate ‘hit’ as well.

But this is truly at the margin. Still worth mentioning because it’s a loss that’ll be coming with almost no notice, I’d guess it has to do with the timing of renegotiating contracts. The airlines being lost are also not ones where Hyatt frequently ran bonus mile promotions, either. Still, always sad to lose earning options or earning partners.