Hyatt has launched its winter promotion. Registration is required to earn double points on qualifying stays, and triple points at Hyatt Place and Hyatt House brands, January 27 – March 28, 2025. (Check-out date is what matters.)
The offer is called ‘Bonus Journeys’ again. Hotel loyalty programs seem to reuse these names. I suppose they’re pretty anodyne. But if we’re going to do stock offers like ‘double points’ at least the promotion’s branding would be an opportunity for creativity!
- Maximum earnings is 20,000 bonus points at 2x, and 10,000 bonus points at 3x, for 30,000 total.
- You begin earning with your first stay, and includes eligible Mr & Mrs Smith properties and The Venetian.
- Award stays count, though doubling and tripling of points requires you to charge eligible spend to the room to earn a bonus.
At ~ 1.4 cents apiece, double points are worth an extra 7% rebate and triple points worth an extra 14% rebate which is pretty good. Hyatt is far less active with promotions than some chains (like Hilton), so this is good to see, though I wish it was for a longer period than just two months.
Globalists with a Hyatt Concierge should find that they’re already pre-registered for the promotion, at least those who opted in to allow this when the feature began a couple of years ago. My registration returned an error that I was already registered.
I’m just curious – what is with them pushing HPs so much in recent promos, to the exclusion of other properties? This feels like the third or fourth time they’ve /really/ tried to push business to HPs in the last year.
(It’s just annoying because I do prefer proper full-service properties and I feel like I’m being effectively dinged for that.)
Hyatt Place has many rundown smelly poorly managed properties that are bottom of the barrel
Breakfast is mediocre and rates can be high.They are desperate to get anybody with a pulse in those beds! The new builds can be nice but the old Amerisuites conversion properties to Hyatt Place etc you couldn’t pay me to stay in them
Why the focus on Hyatt Place? Simple: It is where World of Hyatt prefers its members to redeem their vanishing points! Astute observers of the program would already have noticed a clear and consistent pattern that involves WoH deliberately and relentlessly continuing to put the squeeze on members’ ability to earn significant numbers of redeemable points.
Even when the program manages to offer a rare global promo, it makes sure that the numbers of points that members can earn during the promo period are capped. The current cap of 30K points is just enough for a single standard reward night at a Cat 7 hotel. Wanna buy WoH points? Good luck with that. The points crunch is so bad that members are resorting to the heretical practice of transferring Chase UR points to WoH points to be able to afford a decent award (i.e., one at a better hotel than Hyatt Place)… 🙁
@DCS:
I’m…really not noticing the squeeze, but then again I’ve got a corporate Hyatt card that put me right over the edge on 150 night credits in 2024. Not all from that card (obviously), but between that card and the personal card I think I got over 200k points from last year’s spending. Add in about 95k points from milestones and that’s over 300k points (and a batch of FNAs) before any stay-related points (or the SUB for the Business card) came into play. If anything I’ve sort-of had the opposite “problem” – a steadily rising pile of points (even after I pre-reserved a week-long stay for next summer) while a batch of stays in e.g. NYC are rarely logical to use points on (since I don’t park at those hotels and I’ve been able to be up there on a lot of very cheap days (think <$200 nights in Manhattan). There's also my annual trip to DragonCon, which I /can't/ use points on (something legacy block) as well as a number of travel delay nights where it would be illogical to use points because of airline reimbursements.
Admittedly on the other end of things there /are/ frequently hotels that are really good deals, points-wise and there are some solid HPs out there (Boca's nice – it has a great Italian place on the first floor – and Lake Buena Vista is a favorite because there's a favorite ramen place next door), but all else being equal I'd rather be at an HR (or really, any hotel with a solid on-site restaurant) vs an HP.
Then again, I also really don't know what the [blank] Hyatt is doing these days and I'm not sure they do either – they've gone from like nine brands in 2012 to…33 now?…most of which are (for me) pointless cruft (8-10 all-inclusive brands with another one on the way in, and I couldn't tell you what the differences are aside from one being allegedly further up-market, and about half a dozen boutique-ish brands [what is with this trend, anyway?] alongside that). Admittedly I could see some consolidation in the all-inclusive marketplace (let's face it, they're not popping those out as interstate interchange franchises – that's a place for Hyatt Studios to slip in and I wouldn't be shocked with another Hyatt Place look-alike brand popping in at some point), but there seems to be nothing resembling a coherent strategy over there.