With the 2026 Hyatt devaluation, we thought it would be worthwhile to take a closer look at its brand rankings and what it all means.

We are taking a deep dive into the World of Hyatt program in light of the massive devaluation coming on May 20, 2026. We’ve previously discussed both the award chart changes and the normal movement of individual hotels between the categories. This time we’ll take a closer look at Hyatt brand rankings and how members perceive the usefulness of their free night awards.

Hyatt is one of the few loyalty programs still maintaining award categories

It’s unfortunate, but the popular trend these days is less focused around predictable award cost and more around fixing the value of each point, to an extent. In some ways, you might consider that still “predictable” in that the value you get is generally low per point, but you won’t know the price of an award night until you look.

With the World of Hyatt program, you can feel confident that award nights cost only one of 3 possible points prices (through May 19, 2026) or 5 possible points prices (starting May 20, 2026). Outside of a few of Hyatt’s brands, every Hyatt brand fits into a traditional award category.

Hyatt has a full portfolio of all-inclusive resorts, which range in price from Category A to F. And most of its other properties fall into Category 1 to 8. The brands that do not follow these award categories include:

• Mr. & Mrs. Smith
• The Venetian & Palazzo Las Vegas
• Miraval (still confined to award categories but its own distinct levels)

We can organize how premium Hyatt brands are by award price

A byproduct of maintaining predictable award categories for most brands is that we can actually stack up all brands and do some comparisons. Below, we’ve dug around the list of Hyatt properties and grouped each hotel by brand and award category. Then, we added in the median award price for each award category. From there, it was a simple sum-product to come up with the average median price per brand. These award prices and award categories are before the impending May 20, 2026 devaluation.

What are some observations? For one, we can rank all the brands by average median award price (non-all-inclusives):

A few observations:

• I don’t think anyone is surprised about Park Hyatt coming out on top. It’s meant the be the pinnacle of Hyatt luxury and the price is consistent with the experience.
• We wouldn’t have guessed that Destination by Hyatt comes out quite so high in the ranking (#3). We would have thought it less than the Unbound Collection in both price and quality. It could be because Unbound has cheaper properties in more foreign countries than Destination has.
• Andaz is also lower in ranking than we thought (#7) given its focus on experiences.
• The ranking seems to confirm that many of Hyatt’s newer brand ideas have come on the cheaper end of the spectrum (Hyatt Select, Studios, and unscripted).

All-inclusive Hyatt hotels

What about the ranking for all-inclusives?

We don’t have much experience with all-inclusives and to us a lot of these brands have no distinction in our minds. It’s nice for us to finally get an idea of how they might be ranked if the main consideration is award cost. While both the Unbound Collection and Grand Hyatt have an all-inclusive property each, I’ve excluded them here as their focus isn’t on this type of hotel.

A different perspective of the 2026 devaluation

We can repeat the exercise using both the list of properties that will be changing tiers and the new median award prices. Then we just take the new median award price divided by the old.

The range of increases by brand vary from 19% to 40%, with the average sitting around 27% devaluation. The brands that are least impacted by the devaluation include:

• Dream (+19%)
• UrCove (+20%)
• Hyatt Vacation Club (+21%)
• Hyatt Vivid (+21%)
• Bunkhouse (+22%)

Some of these are the lower quality brands (UrCove and Hyatt Vivid) but Hyatt Vacation Club and Bunkhouse sit in the top 5 of average brand price. In both these brands, there are no hotels moving categories, which tended to penalize award pricing more than help.

We can also get a sense of the brands that are most impacted by the devaluation:

• Story Hotels (+40%)
• Alua (+33%)
• AluaSun (+33%)
• AluaVillage (+33%)
• Caption by Hyatt (+33%)
• Hyatt Zilara (+32%)
• AluaSoul (+32%)
• Hyatt Ziva (+31%)
• Impression (+30%)
• Hyatt Place (+30%)
• Hyatt Regency (+30%)

Here, I provided more examples because most of these are all-inclusive properties. These all-inclusive properties were hit hard across the board. Hyatt didn’t add these to the portfolio to not earn a hefty property on them. Outside of the all-inclusives, Story, Caption, Hyatt Place, and Hyatt Regency were the hardest hit.

You might have assumed Park Hyatt would be one of them given its 11 properties in Category 8. While Park Hyatt would have been above average in terms of total points increase, it’s merely average in percent change given how high those properties already are priced.

Deterioration of the Hyatt free night certificates

By reviewing the brands as we’ve done above, we can place extra weight on how unattractive Hyatt’s free night award certificates have become–especially the Category 1-4 version.

As a brief reminder, here is what each award certificate can be used for:

• Category 1-4 free night award certificate: Any hotel in Category 1, 2, 3, or 4
• Category 1-7 free night award certificate: Any hotel in Category 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, A, B, C, or D
• Ultimate free night award certificate: Any hotel in any category or Miraval

We’re going to ignore the Ultimate because there’s truly no change in its applicability.

The Category 1-4 free night award continues to lose value

Out of the 1,593 Hyatt properties that fall within a category, a total of 1,137 properties are bookable with the lowest certificate. Sounds good, right? Well, over half of those properties fall in Category 1 (329) or 2 (356). On top of that, over 39%(!) of the hotels bookable with this certificate are a Hyatt Place.

Is a Category 1-4 free night certificate supposed to be something aspirational to encourage more people to stay at a Hyatt? We would consider a stay in a “cheaper” brand to be focused more on a specific need and generally not a reason to stay at a Hyatt vs. any other lower-end property. “Cheaper” Hyatt brands bookable with this certificate include:

• Hyatt Place (39.4% of all properties bookable with the Category 1-4 award post-devaluation)
• Hyatt House (12.9%)
• UrCove (6.8%)
• Caption, Hyatt Select, Hyatt Studios, unscripted (2.3%, representing almost all of hotels under each of these brands)

Collectively, Hyatt calls this tier of hotels the “Essentials” tier and of the 1,137 properties bookable with your Category 1-4 free night award, 61.3% hotels belong to this tier post-devaluation.

This fully explains why people keep complaining about why this award losing value, and rightfully so. Hyatt likely looks at the number of properties in total, thinking that using it at over 1,000 properties still proves it has value.

The Category 1-7 free night award has its own issues too

Selecting the right cohort of hotels

If you look at the sheer numbers, you’re going to think the Category 1-7 free night award has no problems. All it can’t book are the 39 properties in Category 8, the 13 in Category E, and the 6 in Category F. But let’s face it–you’re not going to use this at a Category 1-4 hotel because there is an award certificate dedicated to it. Thus, the real baseline for this are the Category 5-7 hotels and the all-inclusive hotels in Category A-D.

Limiting ourselves in this way, we’re down to just 407 hotels that feel “worth it” to use one of these certificates. Perception-wise, this number keeps feeling like it drops because hotels in the upper end–where you get max value–go up to Categories 8, E, or F. Meanwhile, hotels come in that feel like a “waste” because they were once bookable with the Category 1-4 free night award at Category 5.

From there, you’re either going to use it at an all-inclusive or you’re not. All-inclusive hotels make up 31.7% of these hotels we’re focusing on. If you’re a fan of all-inclusive hotels, that’s great to have options.

Quantifying that nagging feeling of devaluation

But let’s spend a moment on the 278 properties that aren’t an all-inclusive and fit in Category 5-7. Devaluations have hit the Hyatt award categories so much that Hyatt Regency, the brand that was ranked in 15th place out of 25 in terms of how expensive its properties are, has the highest proportion of hotels bookable in this cohort (17.3%). Again, is this supposed to be an aspirational award or one that meets basic needs?

Grand Hyatt, which has widely varying quality but usually not that aspirational within the United States, comprises 7.2% of the cohort. Hyatt Place and Hyatt House combined represent 10.1%(!) of the cohort. Do you want to know why you feel like this award is starting to lose its luster? This is it. Between these four brands, that’s 34.5% of the properties that might not feel all that aspirational. And it will unfortunately get worse over time.

Of course, the award has other issues, including a very limited 6-month window to both book and travel on the award after you earn it. It might be hard to plan a great use for the award within that time frame, forcing you to burn it at one of these properties.

Closing thoughts

It’s great that Hyatt maintains an award chart where other hotel loyalty programs generally do not. When they maintain award charts, we can get a better sense of how Hyatt implicitly ranks its hotels by looking at median award price.

However, Hyatt seems to have lost sight of how to actually manage its award charts through devaluations and free night awards. The World of Hyatt program seems to just be going through the motions rather than putting rational thought into how members interact with the loyalty program. But in doing so, Hyatt is destroying exactly what made it stand out from competitors. They need to tread carefully or they risk losing substantial goodwill from customers.

Do any of the Hyatt brand rankings surprise you?