One Mile at a Time asks whether, with Hyatt’s generous program changes to make their awards easily transferable, the program will have fraud issues?
I think it’s inevitable that there’s going to be a huge online market of people buying and selling all kinds of Hyatt awards. After all, they can be transfered so easily, and some of these perks could be worth many hundreds of dollars. The process of making a transfer is also quite anonymous, as you don’t even see the name or World of Hyatt number of the person who transfered you an award.
Now, I don’t necessarily have a strong take on this one way or another, though I’m curious for how long awards can be gifted so easily without some changes being implemented. Personally, I hope that World of Hyatt is simply aggressive with auditing people with suspicious account activity, or that Hyatt even actively monitors websites where awards could be traded or sold.
In fact, there’s already a Hyatt Award Marketplace set up on Facebook! (HT: @myfamiliamusica). And it’s very active:
On the one hand, I expected that a certain kind of abuse would be limited by Hyatt’s program changes.
- With unlimited Guest of Honor privileges (“Globalist For A Stay”), some ‘power users’ would have members transfer points into their account and then make bookings for those members, sharing their Globalist status – sometimes at scale, and occasionally at a profit.
- So eliminating unlimited Guest of Honor going forward limits this kind of ‘leverage’.
Park Hyatt Washington DC Suite
However by making all Hyatt awards transferable, there’s now a market in more types of certificates – free night awards; club access awards; suite upgrade awards; as well as the Guest of Honor certificates that members will earn through stays going forward.
Of course this isn’t entirely new or unique.
- Hotel programs generally offer the ability to transfer points between accounts for free. Marriott limits the number you can transfer, and IHG is just dipping its toes in this water. Hyatt has a paper process.
- One can even transfer Chase (or Bilt) points to Hyatt, and then those Hyatt points to someone else.
- People would book rooms in their own name, and add someone else as an additional guest in order to have them take advantage of benefits (while still earning elite credit themselves).
In fact, the transferability of awards reduces the likelihood of having someone put their name on a reservation where they won’t actually be staying. And having someone use a gifted Guest of Honor certificate earns the gifter an elite number, further reducing that incentive.
Park Hyatt Abu Dhabi Globalist Room Service Breakfast
Seeing a ‘marketplace’ in awards develop so quickly points to the old adage, ‘why we can’t have nice things.’ It’s a great innovation to see awards become transferable. I love making it easier to extend my benefits and take care of family and friends. That makes status more valuable to me.
Of course that transferability already reduces breakage, the likelihood of an award expiring unused. That means these program changes are expensive for Hyatt. A marketplace marginally increases that, but unless it does so materially it may just be noise – something worth doing for members, even with some portion of members breaking program rules.
And anyone actually selling their benefits may see their account shut down. With nearly 1,000 members in this Facebook group already, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a couple of them acting as moles.
People always ruin a good thing. I’d expect Hyatt to either put in restrictions to limit this activity or go back to the original rules against transferability. They would be dumb to just allow it to continue. Also, as a more draconian measure could track down originator of the award, validate relationship when used and shut down the account of the person that sold the award (airlines used to do this back when there was a big market for FF miles in the 80s and 90s). Either way I’d expect changes to head off these problems.
It’s going to make redeeming suites a lot harder if lots of people are selling them. Huge devaluation for globalists (that are honest and play by the rules). Hopefully Hyatt reverses this.
Easy solution to all of this is to implement a nomination process like many Asian air carriers have for frequent flier awards. You get X number of nominees for “free” immediately to whom you can transfer awards freely (Asian air carriers seem to have landed between 5 and 10 nominees) and then additional changes are either not allowed or allowed with a moderate sized fee.
I’d much rather jump through some moderate sized hoops than have asshole, scumbag sellers ruin a good thing for everyone.
We don’t know if people are selling the awards. Yes, if they are it absolutely ruins a good thing. However, with an airline I use, I see people who are mostly worried about expiration of free vouchers coming up and then say for people to DM them to get the QR code. No money is exchanging hands. And, I’d think Hyatt will get wise if the breakage rate goes below what they expect. Then members like this one may find themselves in hot water: a member is Globalist and lives in Texas and one of their Club Access awards is redeemed by a member that lives in London and another that lives in Tokyo and another that lives in Charleston, WV. Hyatt would detect a pattern and would either take action through account suspension or investigate members. Alternatively, Hyatt is the smallest U.S. Hotel chain and has to reward its members in ways that keep them loyal. Marriott and Hilton have at least 2X the hotels and locations in more countries than Hyatt. They keep acquiring and signing reservation/WoH deals with smaller chains but they lost MGM Hotels to Marriott. Loyalty of WoH members comes at a higher price than Bonvoy or HHonors.
Even if a Globalist makes a profit on a few Club Access awards. His/her CLTV (customer lifetime value) is still likely very high. That said, my Club Access Awards will be given away for free.
So you post a link to the FB marketplace ASAP. Nice try at virtue signaling, but it’s really that you’ll do anything for clicks.
Of course people will sell awards.
People who stay on OPM earn lots of points. Their corporate boss gives them 2 weeks vacation a year.
They don’t have time to spend their points, may as well make some money.
I buy my awards off people who travel for work all the time, it’s a win win.
I hope Hyatt punishes anyone doing this. I’m a Hyatt loyalist and value the globalist perks. While I may gift a few GoH’s to family, it never crossed my mind to try a sell. Shame on those people trying to profit off this. Quite class less IMO
Maybe hyatt should let us sell worthless awards they grant us like they used to. I’m done with them. They are a race to hilton marriot delta