There’s a huge change in how luxury partner hotel properties are going to be bookable using World of Hyatt points going forward, so here’s a brief discussion comparing what the program used to allow and what it’s allowing going forward. Spoiler: It’s not good news.

Hyatt’s former luxury-boutique-hotel-partner program: Small Luxury Hotels of the World (SLH)

One of the gems of the World of Hyatt program was (until recently), being able to book a hotel that’s a member of the Small Luxury Hotels of the World portfolio with Hyatt points. Those bookings would include complimentary breakfast for two people per room, a room upgrade when available, early check-in, late check-out, and a welcome amenity even if you didn’t have any kind of special Hyatt status. I always looked at these SLH bookings as kind of a “back door Globalist” option where we’d get free breakfast and special extras even though we only have Hyatt Discoverist status. And the SLH hotels were always really, really nice. The “luxury” part of the SLH name is accurate.

And the award bookings for SLH properties always required a pretty reasonable amount of points, as well—very similarly keyed to Hyatt points categories for comparable Hyatt hotels. SLH points bookings were also based on a fixed points system like Hyatt’s categories, with minor variations for peak and off-peak times of year, so the points cost was predictable and not outrageous. We paid around 17,000 points per night for our SLH stay in Porto, Portugal in 2023, which was absolutely wonderful. We paid around 20,000 points per night for an absolutely gorgeous and wonderful stay at an SLH property in Rome earlier this year. I felt like these stays were amazing deals and allowed us to get an incredibly outsized value out of our points for luxury experiences we wouldn’t have been able to afford with cash.

But the partnership between World of Hyatt and SLH is in the process of ending, so these special gem hotels aren’t going to be bookable with Hyatt points after May 2024.

Hyatt’s new luxury-boutique-hotel-partner program: Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Once news broke that Hyatt was going to be partnering with the Mr. & Mrs. Smith (MMS) hotel group, I immediately started hoping that this new partnership would operate just like the old one with SLH. But this past week we started to see some of the actual booking details Hyatt is offering for these new properties, and it’s wildly different from what we saw with SLH. Here are the main takeaways:

1. Dynamic points prices. This is the biggest downer in all of this news, by far. Instead of having set pricing levels for points redemptions, points prices for MMS bookings will vary according to the cash rate. From what I’ve seen so far, it seems like the maximum value you can get out of a points booking is about 1.4 cents per point, but it can also be as little as 1.2 cents per point. I did the math for about a half a dozen sample properties around the world that are available to book with Hyatt points and that’s what all my calculations pointed to. Comparing that to our recent stay in Rome where we booked rooms for around 20,000 points per night and the cash rate was well over $600, the value is nowhere near the same.
2. Can’t use free night certificates. Hyatt used to allow Hyatt free night certificates to be used for stays as SLH properties. This is not allowed with MMS properties.
3. Elite benefits. Hyatt Globalists aren’t entitled to free breakfast and some other perks at MMS properties like they were at SLH properties.
4. Stays earn elite-qualifying nights. Stays at MMS properties will earn elite-qualifying nights for World of Hyatt, which means booking one of these properties through Hyatt instead of just paying with points (or cash) through the Chase Travel portal at least has some upside to it.

There are more details at the Hyatt website if you’re interested in the nitty-gritty, but my takeaway from this is that the MMS hotel options aren’t going to provide any nice sweet spots for redemptions or elite-status-earning opportunities.

Is there any good news?

If you’re ever looking to book an extraordinary luxury hotel stay at a remote location and just want to be able to pay with points (even if it’s a ton of points) instead of having to pay with money, the MMS property portfolio includes a lot of really gorgeous, one-of-a-kind hotels that would otherwise be impossible to book with points.

Here’s one that I was salivating over:

Explora Torres del Paine, in Patagonia

Booking an all-inclusive luxury stay at one of the most gorgeous locations I’ve ever seen would cost a LOT if paid with money, but having an option to use points (even if it’s over 200,000 points for one night!) could make a stay here actually possible instead of a mere dream.

But other than that, no, there’s not much good news in this. What we had before with SLH was a notable sweet spot in the world of hotel points bookings, and I hope you enjoyed it then because there’s nothing like it now. Using points for Hyatt hotel stays still offers a fantastic redemption value, but you’ll want to focus those points redemptions on actual Hyatt-branded properties with stable pricing instead of the dynamic-pricing situation we find ourselves in with MMS properties.

In spite of all this, Hyatt is still my go-to hotel redemption program

If you want to still get incredible value for hotel points bookings, one of the best ways that you can still do that is to focus on actual Hyatt properties (not the MMS properties they also allow bookings at).

We regularly get close to 2 cents per point value from our bookings at Hyatts, and sometimes way more depending on how in-demand a property is at a certain time. For example, we’re staying at the Park Hyatt Milan this summer during the Eras Tour, and a room there is going for over $1,300 per night (Taylor’s lucky number 13 strikes again!), but we paid 40,000 points per room—a value of 3.25 cents per points! Hyatt is still where it’s at, even with this bummer MMS news. If you don’t already have a World of Hyatt credit card, this is a must-have, in my opinion. The annual free night more than pays for the annual fee, and you earn points much faster for your paid stays than you would without the card. The welcome offer on this card hasn’t significantly changed in a long time, so it’s not one I’d bother waiting for an increased offer for.