Tl;dr – Hyatt recently updated its terms of service limiting members to receiving ten awards as gifts each year.
Hyatt recently changed its terms of service, and if you trade (or receive) World of Hyatt awards, it’s worth knowing about. Members are now limited to receiving ten gifted awards a year, though there are no limits to how many awards you can gift to other members. In the past, I’ve written about the perks of gifting and receiving World of Hyatt awards, including suite upgrade awards, club access awards, guest of honor certificates, Miraval extra night awards, and free night awards. I’ve long felt that Hyatt made a savvy decision when it chose to make these awards freely giftable amongst Hyatt members (a given award can only be gifted once) as it opened up the Hyatt ecosystem to travelers who might not have considered a Hyatt property, as they would now be able to enjoy elite benefits that would ordinarily need to be earned through continued loyalty or patronage.
Well, it seems that Hyatt wants to put a bit of a check on this. Why? Fraud is an easy answer to come up with, though I’m not certain this is the primary (or only) reason, as I don’t have insight into Hyatt’s fraud numbers. Generally speaking, it’s not uncommon for all loyalty programs to face significant and consistent threats from bad actors attempting to compromise accounts and access points, miles, and awards from members, so one could certainly imagine how easily ‘giftable’ awards would be enticing prizes for potential fraudsters. That said, I’m curious if this is just a move by Hyatt to ‘spread the wealth’ and decrease’ power users’ from amassing a disproportionate number of awards. If the goal were to get new people into the ecosystem, Hyatt would be falling short of this goal if it’s finding that the most frequent, loyal travelers are the same individuals who make up the lion’s share of gift recipients.
Either way, this is much ado about nothing. I’ve gifted and received several awards over the last year and a change. There are many groups on Facebook where members regularly exchange awards, such as this one. I patronize a Hyatt a good bit and use awards as much as possible, but I still find myself giving away awards that aren’t as useful to me as a Globalist.
