Comparing Hyatt burn to Marriott burn is not an equal comparison. The same goes for comparing SPG burn.

At Marriott one earns between 10 and 20 points per dollar spent (excluding RI and Exec Stay), whereas at Hyatt one earns between 5 and 6.5 points per dollar spent. At SPG one earns 3-5 points per dollar spent. So naturally Marriott points burn rate would be less since you earn a lot more points.

I personally use 1.5¢/point as my ROM for using MR points. Many other use 1¢/point. Others who do boatloads of business travel and feel they will never use all their points, don't pay attention to the burn rate. Over the years my burn rate has ranged from 1.5¢ to 4.5¢/point.

It depends on your personal situation. In my case all of my travel is personal so I have to pick and choose where to get the best bang for my points. I generally find that NA hotels are much less expensive than those in Europe. Asia varies, but generally I have paid for stays over there. Australia has been going up a lot in the last year, but I am done with OZ travel for a while and was able to get great rates during the past 4-5 recession years. Reasonable rates are quickly coming to an end unfortunately, so I will be using points much more in the future.

I would rather save points for use at nice properties when I travel overseas where it is not uncommon for rates to be $400-1000/night. Now that all depends of where one wishes to travel. If one is not at all interested in going to Europe then perhaps their threshold should be lower.

I would recommend deign what I did when I first started traveling a lot (and was traveling for business late 1990 early 2000) and that is looking at destinations where you want to visit over the next few years and determine which ones will give you the most abng for your points.

Others will mention the Travel Packages which are also and excellent use of points.

I would suggest doing 2 searches in this forum for more information on point values and Travel Packages. First go to the advanced search and search titles for the word point. Second do a search for Travel Packages and you will find a plethora of additional information and some great analysis of point usage.

Another way to do a quantitative comparison is take $10000 and figure out how many points you would earn in each program including your the elite status bonus for the level you think you can maintain, and points from the CC which you should get if you are going to frequent a particular brand, and then see what you can get for those points. Simple math. I have done this previously and posted it in one of the many point valuation threads, so feel free to do a search to find it if you would prefer not to do the math yourself. FWIW, I did not include Hyatt since their hotels are so few and far between. I only did the analysis for Hilton, SPG and Marriott.