I’ve had to admit Hyatt Gold Passport and Hyatt hotels are some of my favourite in the world. Apart from the blogger halo that is showered around them, they seriously are good when it comes to delivering the goods!

Every year, Hyatt, and all the other programs adjust their redemption prices for hotels, to reflect current realities on the market they operate in. This is done by adjusting the category of the hotel, which indicates the slab per which it will cost to book a hotel room in terms of points, or cash + points. As a recap, here is the number of points it takes to book a room in each category per night.

Here is the number of points required for a cash + points reservation per night.

Hyatt last changed their hotel categories in January 2015, so they’ve taken a lot of time this time to adjust categories. I would assume this is in part due to their changes to their systems which took a lot of time late last year to early this year.

They have now announced their 2016 award category changes, which will be in effect for reservations made on or after August 1, 2016. If you are going to stay at a hotel which is going up in points, you can book it now. If you are looking to stay at a hotel which will go down in terms of points after August 1, 2016, you can still book them and the additional points will be refunded to you as of August 1, 2016.

50 hotels are going to go up in terms of categories, and 56 hotels will be reduced one category or more.

Here is the list of hotels going up. Most of these are located in the US of A.

 

Here is the list of the hotels going down. I’ve marked all the Indian ones, which are changing a category or few down. It seems almost all of them apart from the Goa properties are changing categories.

I’ve visited a lot of these Hyatt hotels, and apart from the Hyatt Amritsar and Park Hyatt Chennai, which I’ve visited but not reviewed yet, written extensively about my experiences with each one of them here:

• Ahmedabad: Hyatt Regency Ahmedabad
• Goa: Park Hyatt Goa Resort & Spa
• Hyderabad: Park Hyatt Hyderabad
• Kolkata: Hyatt Regency Kolkata
• Mumbai: Hyatt Regency Mumbai, Grand Hyatt Mumbai
• Pune: Hyatt Regency Pune, Hyatt Pune

Bottomline

It seems a fair deal about the changes in hotel categories over here. There are Indian Hyatt hotels I can book at INR 2500 sometimes, so I don’t see the reason they would be higher up in the categories apart from Category 1. At the same time, the Park Hyatt Hyderabad grows on you, so do make it a point to visit in under the new redemption rates.

What do you guys make of the category changes? Love them? Hate them?

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