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Hyatt’s Upcoming Modest Points Devaluation

Hyatt Gold Passport posted on Flyertalk early this morning that they’d be making changes to their award chart. Currently hotels are spread across five categories. They’re creating a new category 6 as of June 4 at 22,000 points per night. That will include 20 properties. They’re also moving hotels up and down in categories, a total of 89 going up (including the 20 moving to category 6) and 65 going down. On the whole it seems that the reductions are all at the low end, e.g. there are 46 category 2 properties moving down to category 1. And the increases are more evenly distributed and even clustered towards the high end. There are even some two-category jumps, like the Grand Hyatt New York going from Category 4 to Category 6. Hey, I remember when you…

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100 Free Continental Miles, This Time for Saving Your Avis Car Rental Account Number to your Onepass Profile

Points, Miles, and Martinis says that you can get 100 free Continental miles for adding an Avis Wizard Number to your Onepass profile. Took just a couple seconds (but then, I know my Avis Wizard number).  Many folks complain that the various Continental 100 mile promises never actually materialize, but they do seem to post for me for often than not.

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Purchase Starwood Starpoints for 1.45 cents apiece on May 3

Lucky points to an offer where you’ll be able to buy Starwood Starpoints for 1.45 cents apiece (e.g. 10,000 points for $145). Starwood points normally cost $35 per 1000 (but who would buy them at that price except to top off towards a specific award need?). The offer will be up at Discover America Daily Getaways sponsored by American Express on May 3rd. And there are a limited number of each points package, such as only 470 of the 10,000 point offers. And each purchase transaction is limited to 5 packages. There’s been speculation that this means you can only buy a total of 5 points packages, and so the interest has centered around the 10,000 point packages for most effect. But it’s not clear from the rules as to whether that’s per person or…

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United Discounts Their “Rule Buster”-style Awards

For bookings by May 18 and and travel through October 31 that is booked at least 21 days in advance, United is reducing the cost of a ‘standard award’ for domestic travel from 50,000 miles roundtrip to 40,000 miles roundtrip.  The discount applies only to domestic coach awards. In United’s parlance, standard awards are the higher-priced awards that permit travel on any flight without regard to capacity controls. Other airlines have referred to these as “rule buster” or “anytime awards.” Prior to October 2006, 40,000 miles was the regular price of a domestic standard award. Yet something is strange going on here, I can’t quite put my finger on it. Now, it seems that United’s award redemption ‘specials’ seem always to be for coach tickets. That makes them unexciting to me. And I’m not especially…

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