Yesterday, I wrote about the upcoming changes to the Hyatt award chart as they introduce off-peak and peak award dates. These new award categories will affect all award redemptions for hotels and many people were nervous about how they would be defined. Here is how Hyatt will define these new peak dates.
How Will Hyatt Define Off-Peak and Peak Award Calendar?
Since there were a lot of questions (and concerns) about how these dates would be defined, I thought it warranted a quick post to answer this. For good reason, people worried that this could get very bad if individual hotels were allowed to establish which dates would count as “peak” dates for award redemptions.
As it is now, there are some Hyatt hotels that play with awards and upgrades by throwing an extra piece of furniture in a row to reclassify it to keep a majority of rooms/suites out of the award pool.
Here is how Hyatt told me they will be deciding what dates will be assigned as peak and I think this is good news from an otherwise disappointing change:
“Hotels are grouped by geographic market (called market tracts) and properties in the same market will adhere to the same calendar of Peak, Standard and Off-peak periods.”
This means that Hyatt will be assigning the “market tracts” and this will be the determination factor as to what the calendar will reveal for peak, off-peak, and standard dates. Also, the majority of those dates on the calendar will still be standard rates.
To take it even further, unlike Marriott and Hilton, the dates will be fixed once they are released on the rolling 13 month basis. This means that if Hyatt has established that a particular market tract has 6 days of peak days for July (when the calendar is released the previous June), that will not change. It will not jump based on demand.
So, the good news takeaway from this is that individual properties will not be able to adjust and scale these new peak dates and they will not move. These will be fixed dates and will be established by Hyatt according to a geographic marketing grouping and not by individual hotels.
