Hyatt 40 Night Milestone Selection – Which One Did I Pick?
If you remember in my getting a Hyatt free night while sitting in my underwear article I had talked about my quest to hit the Hyatt 40 night milestone before the end of the year. I used that milestone bonus in my calculations on why it made sense for me to hit the World of Hyatt card‘s $15,000 free night from using Plastiq. Well all went as planned and I just made my Hyatt 40 night milestone selection. And wouldn’t you know it, I chose the least valuable option.
What Is The Hyatt 40 Night Milestone Selection?
A few years ago Hyatt completely revamped their World of Hyatt elite program. It is the reason that the MGM status match merry go round is kind of worthless now. With the change to milestones everything is based on elite nights now. Here is a look at the milestones:
As you can see at 40 nights I get to select one of three perks. I wanted to break down the value of each of the choices and then share with you which one I selected and why. Here are the choices:
Breaking Down The Valuations
Now that we know what the options are let’s take a look at what each one is worth.
5,000 Hyatt Bonus Points
First up is 5,000 points. Most people value Hyatt points at around 1.6-1.8 cents a piece. Let’s split the difference and say they are 1.7 cents a piece. That puts this 5,000 point bonus worth $85.
$100 Hyatt Gift Card
This milestone seems pretty straight forward, it is worth $100 to most people. I would probably discount it some since you miss out on charging the $100 on your World of Hyatt card when paying. Plus Hyatt sells their gift cards at a discount a few times per year. In order to make this easy I will say it is worth $100.
10,000 Points On A FIND Experience
I didn’t know much about FIND before getting this reward if I am being honest. I figured it was just like SPG Moments or Hilton’s Concert Series and never gave it much of a thought. This option is easy to overlook as a bad redemption.
The funny thing is it is actually the most valuable of the three options. When you redeem World of Hyatt points towards FIND experiences you get 1.4 cents per point. So this 10,000 point discount is worth $140. That is of course assuming the pricing they publish is accurate to what you could replicate other places. And you would want to get the redemption as close to 10,000 points (there are some) so that you are not redeeming more Hyatt points at $0.003 a piece less than they are worth.
Which Hyatt 40 Night Milestone Selection Did I Make?
You can probably guess which one I went with from my title, the 5,000 points. Even though the points, with a value of $85, is the least valuable choice it works the best for me. Here are a few reasons I made this as my milestone selection:
- Ease of use – No need to keep track of a gift card and trying to find a date and city where a FIND redemption would work.
- Value – stick with me here, this is the least valuable option on the surface. But I stay at a lot of category 1 hotels which usually go for around $150. If I end up using the points there it is the most valuable option.
- Cash Stays – Hyatt points are so valuable and somewhat easy for me to accrue thank you to Ultimate Rewards transfers that I almost never pay cash for stays. That makes the gift card less valuable to me. I know 5,000 points can get me a night in a hotel. I can’t say that for sure with the $100 gift card.
Final Thoughts
I really like the newer World of Hyatt Milestones set up because it rewards you in chunks along the way. It gives me something to shoot for even though I know I am never going to reach Globalist status. This milestone also made the math on my World of Hyatt $15K spend experiment look a whole lot better.
What was your Hyatt 40 night milestone selection? Did you pick the points too?
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I’ll take the points every time.
Me too
You REALLY should push for Hyatt Globalist next year. Use the CC to buy $1000 Simon Mall GCs. Concentrate on no other hotels until you get it.
On top of a ton of benefits, they gave me AA EXP for a year. Worth thousands.
It is a great status but I stay at a lot of non full service properties where it doesn’t do much. When I really need it I have a few people who will do a guest of honor booking for me which really kills my motivation to try
I recently received the 2 Club Lounge awards. Is there any sort of list or filter for Hyatt hotels with Club access? Or do I have to check each hotel individually?
There isn’t anything at this time – I usually send them a DM on Twitter if I am thinking of booking somewhere and they let me know if the hotel has one.
You say that the 5,000 points are the least valuable but to me they are the most valuable of the options. Not because I think 5,000 points is phenomenal but mostly because of the problems I have with the other options.
I have had horrible experiences with Hyatt gift cards, mainly because more than one of them were wiped clean. That’s a headache I don’t want to re-live. This is one of the key issues where Hyatt lost me as a devoted customer. The other bad thing is that they can only be used “at participating hotels”, meaning all Europe and Asia hotels will not accept them, so they are completely worthless for international trips. At best I would assign $50-$75 in value for the gift cards.
I also have zero interest in using points for a FIND experience. Any experience that would interest me is expensive, so I value that close to $0 if not negative (the discount may offset the generally poor use of points on a FIND experience, reverting the total purchase back to normal expected value). I don’t believe in going through all the effort to find a low value experience just to get something for free — especially if I don’t have interest in those low value experiences in the first place.
I agree with what you said. The points were the least valuable if you go by face value but I think you need to dig deeper and see what works best for you. And we both ended up on points for similar reasons.