In May, a World of Hyatt point bought you 1.65 US cents of hotel room, by the reckoning of The Points Guy, the site that appraises loyalty currencies every month. By June it bought 1.55, and it had already slipped from 1.7 the month before, so the slide did not start here. But the June step was not a crash; it was a memo. On May 20, Hyatt expanded its award chart from three price levels per hotel to five, and the ceiling for a top-category night rose from 45,000 points to 75,000. One Mile at a Time did the math the day the chart went live: increases of 33 to 67 percent on some awards across the categories, against decreases of 8 to 14 percent on others at the very bottom.
I scheduled freight containers for three years before I wrote about travel, so let me put this in the plainest terms I have. A loyalty point is a currency whose issuer controls both the printing press and the exchange rate. Hyatt announced the change as "a thoughtful update to the program," and Laurie Blair, its senior vice president for global marketing and loyalty, said it "reinforces our commitment to a published award chart with fixed point thresholds while ensuring World of Hyatt remains strong, sustainable and rewarding for years to come." Both statements are true. The thresholds are fixed. There are simply two new ones above the old maximum.
Fairness demands the counterpoint, so here it is. TPG called this "a fairly mild devaluation": TPG's Katie Genter analyzed more than 1,000 Hyatt properties and found average award rates up between 2 percent in Category 3 and 12 percent in Category 8, and by July the site's Hyatt valuation had recovered to 1.6 cents, where it still sits in August. Hyatt remains, on TPG's own table, the second most valuable hotel currency there is, and TPG's FAQ ties that standing to the chart, which "can help members secure outsize value on some hotel stays."
The sobering part is what the chart's absence looks like. The big three US airlines, Delta, United, and American, scrapped their fixed award charts. Delta went first in 2015 and United followed in November 2019, as the points site Thrifty Traveler has chronicled; American, the last of the three, dropped its chart in April 2023. "Just like cash tickets, these are going to float based on demand," Chris Isaac, American's director of loyalty, told CNBC at the time. Float means the same seat costs wildly different amounts depending on when you look, and there is no document to hold the airline to.
The erosion this produces is not an event anymore; it is weather. I counted the declines in TPG's August 2026 table: five airline currencies dropped in a single month (Aeroplan, Flying Blue, Qantas, United, and Virgin Atlantic each shed 0.05 to 0.1 cents), each drop recorded in a small parenthesis beside the new number, the way a timetable notes a platform change. The same table carries the real headline. The strongest airline mile, Alaska's, is valued at 1.55 cents. The weakest of the US bank currencies on the table, Wells Fargo's, is valued at 1.75. These are the transferable currencies: points that sit at a bank and only become airline miles or hotel points when you choose to move them. Every bank point on TPG's list outvalues every airline mile on it, with Chase at 2.05, Amex at 2.0, and Capital One at 1.85.
So the defense writes itself, with one honest caveat: the bank currencies named above are US ones, so the first rule is to hold points in whatever flexible, transferable currency your own market offers and move them to an airline only at the moment you book, because a balance parked in an airline's ledger devalues on the airline's schedule while a flexible balance keeps its options. Do not hoard; a points balance is a loan to the issuer that pays you nothing while it quietly shrinks. And book early: "Most airlines release award seats between 330 and 361 days before departure," as the award-tracking site AwardFares puts it, and its guide finds that for Delta's dynamically priced awards, searching right when the window opens often yields the lowest price.
I hold no miles myself; they went when the flying went, in 2018. The railway devalues me differently. It raises the fare on a poster, in public, where I can argue with it. That is not virtue, just a currency I can check. If yours lives in an airline's ledger, spend it before the next memo.
