While I was away, United and Hyatt announced devaluations to their loyalty programs. United substantially raised the rates of redemption for premium products on other Star alliance partners, while on United they were a more modest change.
Hyatt added another category and raised the rates of redemption for categories 5 and 6. They also added a cash and points that count for status.
It seems on the Internet many people are blaming bloggers peddling all the credit card points and Chase flooding the market with Ultimate Rewards where the points redemptions are in both programs that were devalued. These same people forget that both United and Hyatt are international corporations with international customers. Outside of Chase, United has other co-branded credit cards from Dah Sing Bank or Mitsubishi UFJ in Asia.
Devaluations happen just like inflation. I understand the inherent risk with manufacturing spend into loyalty programs where this would happen. I had always aimed for an approach of buying points for under a penny, but the landscape outside of my control is slowly changing. With the latest devaluation, it is tough to continue to accumulate points fast enough. That being said, I will have to expand my manufacture spend and generate points at $.01/point to coincide with the devaluation even though I recently wrote about that just half a percentage point to 1% is a huge increase.
