tl;dr – It could mean something, it could mean nothing.
A few weeks ago, many Hyatt members received surveys that identified several potential tweaks to the World of Hyatt loyalty program. For many, this seemed to hint at the fact that Hyatt could potentially insert another higher tier than Globalist – the current (normal) highest ranking tier of World of Hyatt.
Other items in the survey included tinkering with the parking benefits (potentially deprecating them), getting rid of (or changing) My Hyatt Concierge, changing Milestone awards, allowing members to top off award certificates for redemptions, premium suite awards (currently suite upgrade awards only book standard rooms), an award forcing standard room availability for your dates as long as they are six months out, and making points redeemable for additional award certificates.
For the purposes of this piece, I’m just gonna focus on the ‘higher tier than Globalist’ piece. Whether this survey is indicative of anything coming in the future isn’t known. However, if Hyatt has plans to introduce a tier higher than Globalist or potentially water down existing Globalist benefits, then I can only say I told you so.
For some time now, I’ve been saying that Hyatt Globalist isn’t worth it and that most people are better off without it. In the spirit of transparency and peak-Hypocriticism, I write this as a Globalist for four years in a row. Back when Hyatt introduced the ability to easily share award certificates – Guest of honor awards, Free night awards, Club access awards, Miraval awards – it fundamentally changed how folks could approach the Hyatt portfolio. The casual traveler could now access top-tier benefits for themselves and their family for a week with minimal effort. There’s an entire market of gifting/trading/bartering for Hyatt awards where the cost of becoming a ‘fly-by Globalist’ is no more than $60. (I’m not suggesting that folks are buying awards. To do so would be against Hyatt’s terms of service. I’m merely affixing a value to how much it costs to acquire a Guest of Honor certificate to prove a point.)
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…Did you scroll this far? OK, good – folks definitely are buying and seller awards. LOL.
And you have to imagine Hyatt knows about all of this and has greatly benefited from it. How many new World of Hyatt members has the chain welcomed? How many never-before-stayed-at-Hyatt-property folks are now part of the ecosystem? Probably many.
The point is clear – Regardless of whatever changes Hyatt may make to Globalist (or its loyalty program), it’s never been less worth it to ‘chase’ Globalist for anyone that’s on the fence. Loyalty status doesn’t mean anything when you’re not actively traveling at a property, so unless your Hyatt power user, in which case you’d organically achieve Globalist, you’re better off grabbing a Guest of Honor certificate for the two to three times you’ll stay at a Hyatt each year. Sometimes, with points and miles, it’s easy to get starry-eyed and fixate on goals that frankly don’t make sense for your travel patterns. For most folks, though, Globalist just doesn’t make sense.
