Originally Posted by
thbe
Doctor of Credit cited a range
of +20% to +37.5%, not a flat +37.5%. But without a clear methodology it’s hard to know what that range is actually measuring.
If you look at the published tables, the outcomes depend entirely on which categories and which price points you end up booking. For example, comparing like-for-like price points within a category, the change can be negative at the low end and very large at the high end.
At the extremes, a traveler who only redeems Cat 1 at the lowest price point could see a decrease, while someone redeeming mostly top-category hotels at the highest price points could see a very large increase. Real-world impact will sit somewhere between those extremes depending on booking patterns and availability.
Using the tables, that’s roughly -14% if you compare the old lowest Cat 1 price point to the new lowest, and roughly +67% if you compare the old highest Cat 8 price point to the new highest.
I'd bet that few posters here would be interested in the properties with the "Lowest" award prices (if they're made available at all), and the redemptions that interest most of us are in the higher end properties that would likely be priced in the two highest tiers during the periods we'd be travelling. If so, the real-world impact on the value of Hyatt points will be severe.
Are we going to abandon Hyatt over this? Probably not. But would this massive devaluation cause us to respond accordingly in how we choose hotels and how we spend on Hyatt and other Chase credit cards? I'd think so.