Now that the dust has settled after the major Hyatt devaluation on May 20th, how have things changed? As a reminder, Hyatt has moved from 3 award price levels (off peak, standard, and peak) to 5 (lowest, low, moderate, upper, and top). In the worst case, awards at the new “top” category can cost as much as 67% more than they did previously.
With that out of the way, the general consensus is that the highest end properties were hit the worst, while the lower end, category 1-3 properties were generally left intact. Fortunately, many of those properties had peak prices track to moderate and off-peak track to lowest in the new award chart. These are small, if short term, wins in an otherwise ugly situation. I fully expect as the calendar starts to populate for peak summer travel in 2027, we will see more drift towards the upper end of the award prices across all categories.
Here are the before and after pictures of 5 prominent properties. I pulled the current award calendars for December 2026 to April 2027 for these properties very late at night on May 19th, just an hour or so before the cutover. For an even deeper dive into the data, you can also check out this post from Thrifty Traveler.
Andaz Maui at Wailea Resort
This property tracked pretty cleanly on dates that had availability before and after. Some off-peak dates formerly 35k points per night and no single night went to upper or peak, resulting in a max increase of 10k points per night over that time frame. Here is a comparison of December 2026 before and after:
Park Hyatt Paris Vendome
Before and after May 20th there was not a single night available in the month of December. Looking into 2027, the few available nights at the standard rate did map to low. This is somewhat positive but still represents a 5k per night increase. While it was great not to see nights pricing at 75k “top” levels, the general lack of availability is extremely disappointing. Here is March 2027 before and after:
Hyatt Centric French Quarter, New Orleans
The lowest category property on this list (category 4) is one I have stayed at many times in the past and reviewed last year. This one was pretty mild, as most off-peak dates become lowest and stayed at 12k points. Even the peak dates at 18k only become 20k as moderate for now. Here is a comparison for March 2027:
Park Hyatt Tokyo
At first glance, this one wasn’t too bad, with many dates in December holding relatively steady, mostly moving from 40k to 45k a night (low). January was even better with about 2/3 of the nights which were off-peak at 35k staying put at lowest and still 35k per night. In the more popular spring season things got much worse, however. April saw some former peak nights at 45k move to the new highest end top at a whopping 75k, a max 67% increase. Here is April 2027:
Great Scotland Yard Hotel, London
Our last property is a category 6 in London. December was reasonable with many nights moving from 29k to 30k but some moving down from 29k to 25k. That was exciting to see. January and February continued the trend with 21k off-peak nights moving to 20k lowest. March and April held firm with most 25k standard nights holding flat as they are now in the low category. Here is the March 2027 before and after:
TL;DR: While there are some properties that really got nuked with the May 20th Hyatt devaluation, there were some bright spots. Some properties had many nights with no increases, and even some decreases. However, I fully expect as time goes on and new months are loaded into the award calendar that things will get worse.
