Overall a fine stay, or as good as of a stay that involves three different rooms over four nights can be. There's definitely a big dip in room maintenance and staff experience since the last time I was here in early 2024.
Room: Because of maintenance issues, I had the "opportunity" to try three different rooms, the Casita Suite, the Executive Suite, and my usual request, a base room with a runway view (the hotel kindly gave us two of them connecting to compensate for the lack of available suites). Hashed out the Casita vs Executive Suite on an earlier thread, so will just say here that all three of my rooms had maintenance issues, including no hot water in one of the rooms in the final room. Runway view rooms here remain one of my favorite Hyatt views anywhere. Noise can still be an issue on wedding weekends, but was not too bad during my stay.
Service: Generally well intentioned and quick to respond, but almost everyone I talked to mentioned that they were relatively new to the hotel. I think it showed a lot with issue resolution, it took a few tries for the hotel to meaningfully respond to any of the maintenance issues beyond "we'll send an engineer up at some point." I really liked how hard they tried to ensure that I had some comparable room to a suite as a Globalist, I don't think many other properties would have cared that much.
Property: I believe this was my first visit to the new pool deck by the tower, which was sufficient but unexciting. Supposedly they have pool bar F&B service, but at least during my stay it was you can walk into 1838/Oystercatchers and bring food out. Gym is well stocked and well maintained. Boardwalk progress remains non-existent, and the walk from the tower to the Casitas remains a hilarious path through the staff parking lot.
Prive: Benefits were a bit confusing here. I booked for myself and another couple, on the second night I received a welcome amenity and they did not, so I'm not sure if it was actually a welcome amenity or an apology for the broken room. They had to be reminded at checkout for both days to apply the $100 credit. Early check-in/late checkout were no problem, especially for my friends who are not status holders.
As a category 4, it's still a good use of burning a cert or some points, as well as a good spot for business travel, but if I were paying cash for leisure I would probably have second thoughts if the price is higher than some of the alternatives downtown (e.g., the JW).