Category Archives for Hotels.
Hyatt explicitly lets members gift their elite status to friends when they book awards in someone else’s name.
But booking a paid reservation for someone else using your own account is verboten. Frequently some members will book a stay in their own name and add a friend as a second guest on the reservation.
Back in September I wrote that as a result of Hyatt’s minority investment in Oasis, the home sharing site would join Hyatt’s loyalty progam. That’s now happened. And you can triple-stack promotions with it.
So while Airbnb talks notionally about what a loyalty program might look like (for both home owners and for guests), Oasis already has one for guests. Hyatt’s. Because effective today Oasis is now part of Hyatt’s ‘Unbound Collection’ brand. And much of the rest just follows logically.
In September Hyatt named Mark Vondrasek as their new head of loyalty ‘and business platforms’. Tellingly at the time he reported directly to the chain’s CEO — and not to the Chief Marketing Officer, who was most responsible for Hyatt’s loyalty program revamp that launched last year. That CMO has since been departed.
Starwood lets you transfer points free to someone else’s account but your account and theirs must be registered with the same home mailing address. It’s actually even easier with Hilton and Hyatt.
That means you can get friends and family to sign up for cards and give the points to you. In fact they can sign up for cards you may not be able to get yourself.
Last week I wrote about the games Hyatt Regency Aruba was playing to avoid offering award nights.
Whereas a week ago there were generally no award nights available during low season when this category 6 property was pricing in the $200s, you can now use points when it’s far more expensive.
Hyatt CEO Mark Hoplamazian demonstrated again in his quarterly earnings call that he doesn’t understand the value proposition of his loyalty program. His metrics for success do not tie to his program’s own value proposition. Yet he offers some hope.
In Marriott’s earnings call yesterday Arne Sorenson laid out his thinking on the loyalty program that will combine Marriott, Starwood, and Ritz-Carlton in 2019.
The only thing from Sorenson’s remarks that worries me is that they’re driving down the cost of the program for hotels, although no doubt that’s a part of how they get properties on board with program changes they’re planning to announce in the coming months.
Marriott’s ‘Leadership’ prefers the Hyatt Regency LAX over the half dozen Marriott properties in the area.
When a hotel program promotes that you can use points for any ‘standard room’ available on property, you think that means the most common room at the hotel. It doesn’t. It means the worst or lowest category room at the hotel.
And some hotels use this to prevent members from using their points. Hyatt has had real problems with this at some of its premier properties.
Today you can buy Wyndham Rewards points at a cost of $11 per 1000 (so 1.1 cents per point). They limit you to purchasing just 5000 points per year.
Starting tomorrow they’re increasing the amount of points you can buy to 10,000 but also raising the price to $13 per 1000 (1.3 cents per point).
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
