Today is Hyatt’s massive devaluation with a new 5 tier award chart for each category level which creates 78 different price points and some hotel awards becoming as much as 67% more expensive.
Hyatt Regency Aruba
Naturally, there’s been a rush my members to redeem their points before Hyatt steals the value of what they’ve earned. And people who left this to the last minute ran into major problems, as Hyatt’s technology melted down – unable to keep up with member demand as they tried to head for the exits with their accumulated balances.
@HyattConcierge, I love you guys, but I must express my frustration with the state of your website, app, and customer service. It’s quite inconvenient when members cannot make reservations, especially when you’re about to make significant changes to my redemptions pic.twitter.com/EQAeHSUaKR
— Saianel (@saianel) May 20, 2026
Online people saw “contact hotel” instead of an ability to book awards, processing errors, failures at the stage of completing reservations and various errors across Hyatt’s app and website – while being unable to get through by phone.
Park Hyatt Paris
Shortly before midnight on May 19th, a Hyatt member wrote that their “website is having major issues”,
“We are currently experiencing issues.” Well well well, did you think your website would start having problems if you majorly devalue your points and everyone tries to book. Also been on hold for 20 mins so far. Via Chrome desktop is completely dead, Firefox is working every 5th refresh or so.
Park Hyatt London
This experience was widespread. Here’s another thread complaining about an inability to book and another one and also this one and this one. Here’s someone who transferred points to book a hotel and now the points are stuck, and they’re unable to get the room booked. Here’s another long thread of frustrated members.
Hyatt told members they had until 9 a.m. Eastern on May 20th to book under prior pricing, but that wasn’t true – because Hyatt itself failed to allow members to spend their points.
It seems clear that Hyatt should allow an extension because of this rug pull, although I’d be surprised if they did. There are workarounds without having to roll back the devaluation. They could offer manual adjustments by phone.
Park Hyatt St. Kitts
Nonetheless, the lesson is one we’ve seen before – do not trust a loyalty program to honor these deadlines. There will be a rush for the exits, that volume will overwhelm the program even though it’s entirely predictable because they have no incentive to staff up or add IT resources and spend money to make it easier for members to drive up their redemption expense.
So never wait until the deadline to make your redemptions before a big devaluation or major expiration cliff (like airline systemwide upgrades).
Yeah. I was searching at 8:30 EST and saw availability. Checked another property and then got that “Contact hotel” message. Then at 8:38 PM I went back to my original search from a few minutes earlier and got that message for every property. Figured either Hyatt made a change then or the website was overwhelmed.
More like: “do not trust a loyalty program to honor…” anything.
There should be a baseline of protections for consumers so that corporate programs like these cannot be so significantly devalued.
I’m being told by a libertarian that any rules LIMITING corporations from ruling over us would (ironically) be ‘tyranny’… *facepalm*