MarkOK

I just stayed at HR Lake Tahoe for 4 nights. These were the benefits I received:

1. Waive resort fees: $36 per night ($144 value)
2. Waived valet parking: $28 per night ($112 value)
3. Two Spa day passes (0$ value because I ended up not using them)
4. Free upgrade with a TSU to a 750 sq ft 1 bedroom suite. (cash upgrade value that week was only $116 per night or $464 total)
5. Redeemed the two most expensive nights for points (at a 2.3 cent/pt redemption for the base line room) (and paid cash the cheapest two nights).
6. Free Lounge access for my family of three with breakfast (including hot egg dishes every morning), evening hors d'oeuvres (which included on various nights sliders, steak teriyaki, tacos) with free wine/beer and a few desserts. (not all lounges are equal, but this one would rate solidly typical in my experience)
7. Personal email a week before my stay and a follow up text message the day before my stay from the General Manager and VIP managers (and I texted back three times for special requests that were honored within minutes).
8. Roll-away bed for 1 night when a family member joined us (which wasn't charged -- I don't think it is an official policy, but I have gotten roll-aways at three different properties now and haven't been charged once for them. I also got a couple phone call charges removed at check out without asking).
9. Earned base and bonus pts on food/liquor and on kayak rental charges in addition to the cash nights.
10. A Later check out (not the standard 4PM but since it was a resort/casino property the benefit was 'as available', -- they allowed 1PM which was 2 hours later than normal checkout time and apologized profusely that they couldn't do better.)
11. And my combined reservation and suite upgrade booking was secured through two quick email exchanges with my excellent Hyatt Concierge within a few hours of first contact.

In other words, if I wasn't globalist, I would have had to pay $2500 for the hard direct cash value benefits and gotten none of the soft benefits. My costs-- 40,000 pts and $450. And nothing was out of the ordinary (other than the unused spa passes maybe). I always get free parking on award stays, waived resort fees, free breakfasts/lounge access (which varies in quality, but I am very satisfied in all but a few cases), usually get late checkout (not 100% consistent, but 4PM is usually given proactively), have four TSUs a year, good pt redemptions, and about half the full service properties reach out with an email pre-arrival. The only thing I don't get very often is complementary upgrades to suites at check in -- I have gotten a few real gems, but usually I am staying for 4-10 days at a time and a suite has rarely been available for my entire stay, though I practically always get a tangible upgraded room type or at least a great view.

I have never been top tier at SPG, but I have doubts from their stated benefits or the anecdotes FT page that I would have been able to get this kind of benefit value from them pre- or post-merger.

General comments --
The CC elite night earning benefit of Hyatt should be clearly stated as 5 nights PLUS 2 earned night credits per 5K spend. I fully expect to get 15-30 nights earned a year from normal casual use on my WoH credit card. And let's not forget that WoH globalist comes with a free cat1-4 and a free cat1-7 per year, and the CC can give you two cat 1-4s a year (annual with the anniversary and after 15K in spend). That is four free nights a year.

I don't exactly take any bloggers pt valuation seriously. I've never redeemed a Hyatt pt for less than 2 cent per point (after 386,000 redeemed points during the last 18 months). I average about 2.5 cents a point, and I have redeemed as high as 5.5 cents per point. I keep thinking that I will saturate out good redemption options and be pushed to burn at a lower rate, but thus far I haven't. Meanwhile, I have yet to be able to find a way that works for me to get anywhere near the blogger's inflated evaluation for my airline miles ("Lucky" values AAdvantage miles at 1.3 cents per mile -- I haven't been able to find a redemption for more than 1.0 cent per mile so far, and getting even that took hours of searching for dates that would give me the 'saaver' redemptions. In my opinion, he (and others) seem to inflate the value of airline miles on what you 'could' get while valuing Hyatt pts for what you would get using a shotgun approach; and/or , they are too heavily biasing their valuations for international resort travel (where hotel redemptions aren't always as good, and where there is a better likelihood of scoring a higher on-paper valuation for some international mid-week pt-saver J/F ticket).