Unusual things happen frequently enough with my trips that I think in the end I'd spend way more time and money dealing with third parties.

I would get noticeably worse service from hotels when I was using citi's 4th night free back in the day. Sometimes hotels were even explicit about it "because you booked through Expedia..."

ETA it's also not *that* great of a rate for Globalists. You're missing out on 4k points which I would value at around $70. You're also missing out on (assuming 2 adults, no kids, per room) 8 breakfasts. Which, if you're going to have breakfast at the hotel, could be worth about $150, probably more. If you weren't going to eat at the hotel, but decide to because it's free, maybe you discount that value in half, so $75. If you value each EQN at $20 - which is pretty fair given you get 10k points at each 10 EQN interval, then that's an additional $80. So you're already at $225 in benefits booking directly through Hyatt. And that's before any of the soft benefits of booking directly with Hyatt.