It is now official, or at least as official as these things get before the consultants finish their slide deck and the loyalty team starts pretending this is “enhancing recognition” for their “most valuable guests.”
Hyatt, the one hotel program that many people still treated as the last relatively sane player in the industry, now appears to be flirting with a new tier above Globalist, likely tied to some glorious cocktail of very high night requirements and very high annual spending.
And honestly, I think this is stupid.
Not “mildly disappointing.”
Not “unfortunate.”
Not “a complicated evolution in the loyalty landscape.”
Stupid.
Because the hotel industry keeps looking at the airline industry, copying its most anti-customer habits, and acting like this is some kind of sophisticated strategy. It is not. It is lazy. It is cynical. And I think it completely misunderstands why hotel loyalty worked in the first place.
Hotels Keep Copying Airlines Like a Bad Student Copying the Dumbest Kid in Class
This is the part that really gets me.
Somewhere along the way, hotel executives looked at airlines and decided that the future of loyalty was to reward spending more aggressively, while caring less and less about actual frequency. The logic probably sounded beautiful in the boardroom. Reward the high spender. Filter out the low-yield frequent guest. Optimize the elite pool. Improve economics. Make the numbers look cleaner. Everyone nods. Everyone feels smart. Then everyone goes for coffee.
But hotels are not airlines.
Airlines were able to get away with gutting loyalty because they operate in a far more protected market. On many routes, passengers do not have meaningful alternatives. You still need to get from one city to another, and often the choice is between one bad option, another bad option, and a third bad option with worse timing.
Hotels do not have that luxury.
Hotels compete in an environment where substitution is everywhere. If a Marriott annoys me, there may be a Hyatt nearby. If Hyatt starts playing games, there may be a Hilton across the street. If all three annoy me, there is probably a boutique hotel with better design, better service, and less loyalty-program theatre. And if I want, I can skip all of them and book an apartment.
That is why this copycat strategy is so absurd.
Airlines had structural power when they decided to treat loyalty like a finance product.
Hotels have competition.
That difference matters.
The Bug in the System: Rich People Are Loyal to Hotels, Not Brands
This is the flaw that I think the spreadsheet people either do not understand or are too arrogant to care about.
Rich people are not necessarily loyal to hotel programs.
They are loyal to specific hotels.
They love that Park Hyatt.
They love that Aman.
They love that suite at the Mandarin Oriental.
They love that Four Seasons where the staff know their name and their breakfast order and probably the exact temperature they like the room set to.
That is where their loyalty sits.
Not in some corporate dashboard.
Not in some elite progress tracker.
Not in some artificial requirement that says congratulations, you spent enough this year to be deemed “important” by a loyalty department.
A genuinely wealthy traveler does not suddenly become emotionally attached to Hyatt because Hyatt creates a shinier tier above Globalist. That traveler may stay at the Park Hyatt Tokyo one month, Aman Venice the next, Rosewood Hong Kong after that, and not lose a minute of sleep over whether this helps qualify for some new elite badge.
That is the bug in the system.
Hotels think they are designing these spend-heavy tiers to capture the most lucrative customers. But many of those customers were never really playing the loyalty game in the first place. They were buying the property, the location, the service standard, the vibe, the prestige, the familiarity.
They were never loyal to the logo.
Meanwhile, the People Who Are Actually Loyal Get Punished
And this is where the whole thing becomes even more insulting.
Who are the people that actually engage with hotel loyalty programs in the most consistent way?
Road warriors.
Consultants.
People on project work.
Frequent business travelers.
People who really do spend 60, 80, 100, 120 nights a year in hotels.
These are the people who repeatedly choose a chain, repeatedly tolerate the inconsistencies, repeatedly forgive the bad breakfast, the lazy upgrades, the broken lounge, the “enhanced” benefits that somehow always get worse.
And what do the revenue-based prophets want to tell them?
Sorry, your loyalty counts less because your company negotiated too good a rate.
Sorry, you gave us a third of your life this year, but not enough minibar spend.
Sorry, you slept with us a hundred nights, but apparently not luxuriously enough.
That is insane.
If someone chooses your brand dozens and dozens of times in a brutally competitive market, that is loyalty. Full stop. That is the behavior you should want. That is the behavior you should reward. That is the behavior that built these programs in the first place.
Instead, hotels seem determined to tell these guests that repeated choice is no longer enough unless it comes wrapped in sufficiently premium revenue.
It is one of the most self-defeating ideas in modern loyalty.
And Then Comes the Part They Really Should Be Afraid Of
If the story ended there, it would already be bad enough.
But it gets worse.
Because once you turn a loyalty program into a more spend-engineered, more financialized, more arbitrage-friendly machine, you do not just reshape the behavior of genuine guests. You invite in a different kind of participant altogether.
The dealers.
The brokers.
The runners.
The resellers.
The people who do not care about your brand, your service culture, your guest-recognition philosophy, or whatever polished nonsense your loyalty VP said at an industry conference.
They care about margin.
And the more a program’s top-tier status can be manufactured, maintained, monetized, and resold, the more attractive it becomes to exactly those people.
That is the part these programs never want to talk about in public.
Because it is embarrassing.
They say they want to reward their “best customers,” but what they may actually do is create a system where some of the most aggressive participants are not loyal travelers at all. They are operators. They are middlemen. They are there because benefits can be turned into inventory.
Guest perks become products.
Suite upgrades become products.
Points become products.
Recognition becomes products.
Status itself becomes a product.
At that point, your loyalty program is not a loyalty program anymore.
It is a marketplace.
And good luck maintaining any sense of exclusivity once that starts scaling.
This Is How Programs Rot
People often think loyalty programs die in one dramatic moment.
They do not.
They rot.
A threshold changes here.
A benefit gets harder to use there.
A new premium tier appears.
A requirement becomes more revenue-heavy.
An award chart gets less honest.
An upgrade becomes more “subject to availability” than before.
A lounge gets crowded.
A breakfast benefit gets watered down.
A genuine frequent guest notices that despite staying constantly, the program feels less generous, less sincere, less worth caring about.
That is how it happens.
And eventually the emotional contract breaks.
That is the real damage. Not just that the economics change, but that the guest stops believing the brand actually values loyalty in any meaningful way.
That is why this matters.
Because in hotels, unlike airlines, customers can actually walk away.
Hyatt Was Supposed to Know Better
That is what makes this especially disappointing.
Marriott long ago chose scale over elegance.
Hilton has spent years turning elite recognition into a game of inflation and inconsistency.
IHG has never exactly been the place I would go looking for a pure, principled vision of loyalty.
But Hyatt?
Hyatt was the one chain that, at least relative to the others, still felt like it understood the assignment.
Not perfectly.
Not saintly.
Not without flaws.
But it still felt like a program where choosing the brand repeatedly mattered. It still felt like there was some connection between actual hotel loyalty and elite recognition. It still felt like a road warrior had a realistic shot at meaningful status without having to prove they were also moonlighting as a hedge fund.
That mattered.
And if Hyatt now decides that even it needs to join the industry-wide worship of revenue metrics, then it is not just another devaluation. It is the collapse of the last illusion that at least one major hotel chain still believed loyalty should be tied primarily to behavior rather than wallet theatrics.
Hotels Are Copying the Wrong Industry at the Wrong Time
This is what makes the whole thing even more ridiculous.
Hotels are copying airline-style revenue loyalty at exactly the moment when travelers have more alternatives than ever. Boutique hotels are stronger. Independent luxury hotels are more visible. Apartment-style stays are normalized. Consumers are increasingly willing to book for experience, not brand allegiance.
And in that environment, the big chains are deciding that the answer is to make loyalty feel colder, more transactional, more spend-obsessed, and more detached from actual guest preference.
Brilliant.
Truly brilliant.
Take the one thing that still gives people a reason to choose your chain over the one next door, then slowly turn it into a bureaucratic spending contest.
What could possibly go wrong?
Final Thoughts
I think this is a serious strategic mistake.
Not because I am nostalgic.
Not because loyalty programs should never evolve.
Not because hotels should ignore revenue entirely.
But because this kind of evolution misunderstands what hotel loyalty is supposed to do.
Hotel loyalty is supposed to create attachment in a market full of alternatives.
It is supposed to reward repeated choice.
It is supposed to make a frequent guest feel recognized, valued, and slightly irrational for even considering the chain next door.
Once that becomes secondary to revenue signalling, the whole thing starts to lose its meaning.
And when hotel loyalty loses its meaning, the truly wealthy will still book the hotels they already love, the real road warriors will start questioning why they bother, and the resellers will be the ones happily doing the math.
That is not a stronger loyalty ecosystem.
That is a program following airlines off a cliff, except this time the people with parachutes will not be the guests the chains thought they were rewarding.
Have thoughts on the revenue-based shift? Found this post through a reseller? Either way, I’d love to hear from you. Drop a comment below or find me on social.
