Also, the site seems to be down yet again.

yup, HTTP 503 error:

Service Temporarily Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

Site appears to still be down as of 11:35a eastern

Still down, 11:54 a.m., California time.

Dear Flyertalkers,

Hyatt.com and Goldpassport.com should be up and running as of approximately 1:00 PM CST. Sorry for any inconvenience this caused.

Happy Travels,
Chrissi R.

It's up and running fine again as of 3p eastern!

Bill from E-commerce here. Sorry for my slow reply, my notification that there was a new post didn't work for some reason.

With regards to this comments regarding the Gold Passport bonus offers, I've seen that a number of people have commented on this. One of our goals with the update was to make the special offers section more usable by cleaning up the interface and providing a single location for offers, rather than having to look at Hyatt.com and then at GP.com. We also made the search capability much more prominent (it used to be at the bottom of the special offers page and received little usage). In addition, we took a look at other loyalty programs and, in particular, the way Marriott implemented this.

The concern seems to be that it is harder to find GP special offers. If you are interested in a particlar city, state, or country, you can just search for the destination and see all of those offers. Is the concern that this destination serach imposes an extra step or that even after specifying a location it is still harder to use?

Bill from E-Commerce here. I don't know if this group is interested in these details, but I thought I'd let you know that the outage we had was due to a communications line failure that caused messages to back up and take the site down. Unfortunatley, it took some time for the telco vendor to resolve the problem. We've modified the site so that if such a communications line failure occurs again, it won't make the site unstable but will instead just make the transactions requiring the services using that communications line unavailable. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I prefer the old way. The old way was easier because I sometimes travel to multiple cities all in one trip and I don't want to have to search for each city at a time to find the bonus.

Also, sometimes, I will stay at a property because of the bonus, meaning that I don't know my destination, but I'm willing to do a stay there to get the bonus. The new format does not really handle that type of browsing well

Exactly - for many of us - we could choose a property based on if they are running a Gx bonus or not - for interchangable hotels - eg GH vs HR SF, HP South & North at Dulles for example.

Well, with the new UI you can enter "Dallas, TX" as your search criteria and see all the bonus offers for the properties in that city/area in one shot.

I do agree that it makes searching for bonus hounds who ultimately don't care where they stay more difficult than the old tabular form. I wonder if both options could be provided. After all, I assume it's all produced from a database that probably didn't even change in the UI switch.

Thanks, Bill.

The old method was much simpler, as I could just click on a specific country, or state, and then see what was being offered. It seemed to save time, where as the new method makes me enter a specific state. Sometimes, I base where I want to go or stay by the offers they have. The new method makes me spend a greater amount of time for something that used to be much simpler..

Here's an annoyance with the "Past Stay Credit Request" form:

For a recent stay, I was missing the G3 and the Diamond Amenity bonus. The form only lets you specify one bonus code, so I entered "G3" and in the comment field I explained that the Diamond amenity didn't post either. Sadly, that comment was completely ignored and only the G3 bonus posted.

So I tried to submit another request, this time for the 1W Diamond Amenity. But that doesn't work -- the website rejects a second request for the same stay outright with the error message

"You have already submitted an uncredited-stay request for these dates at this hotel. For assistance, please contact Hyatt Gold Passport Customer Service at 1-800-30-HYATT or your nearest Worldwide Reservation Center."

I know I can just email GP Customer Service, but IMO it's still a poorly designed feature.

Reservation system down - website problem AGAIN when I have to make my bookings! This is really really getting tiresome! Somebody at the tech department needs to be fired as even a 16 year old could do a better job than currently!!



And of course, to call Hyatt from the UK I have to pay the premium rate 0845 number - way to go!!

Saturday night in the US, so this might be regularly scheduled downtime (a lot of companies do that). That said, a "global selling" system should really have a near-zero downtime for maintenance requirement.