If you missed out because of last night’s Hyatt website issues, I have no sympathy

View from the Wing has reported that, yesterday evening, the evening before the big Hyatt devaluation, there was sudden rush of World of Hyatt members looking to redeem their points at the last minute. Apparently, this led to a website meltdown which left some members struggling to book awards.

VFTM suggests that …

“Hyatt told members they had until 9 a.m. Eastern on May 20th to book under prior pricing, but that wasn’t true – because Hyatt itself failed to allow members to spend their points.”

… and …

“It seems clear that Hyatt should allow an extension because of this rug pull, although I’d be surprised if they did. There are workarounds without having to roll back the devaluation. They could offer manual adjustments by phone.”

I could not disagree more and I have absolutely no sympathy for 99% of people who found themselves unable to redeem their Hyatt points last night.

Let’s be clear about a key thing here – this wasn’t a sudden or shock devaluation.

Hyatt told us back on 25 February that it would be devaluing its award charts in May 2026 and, a few weeks ago, it confirmed that the changes would kick in today. 20 May 2026. There was plenty of warning.

World of Hyatt members have had more than enough time to decide what bookings they’d like to make and more than enough time to lock those bookings in before yesterday, so unless you have been completely incapacitated since the end of February (my sympathies if that’s the case) or you were trying to book an award for the night of 17 June 2027, there’s no good excuse for not getting your bookings in before last night.

In fact, the night of 17 June 2027 was available to be booked from around 2am ET yesterday, so needing to book that night isn’t really an excuse for leaving things until midnight last night either.

The fact is that if you can’t get your **** together, that’s all on you.

Is it annoying that the Hyatt website couldn’t handle the sudden onslaught of people who failed to get their act together in time? Yes, it probably it.

But if you were impacted by last night’s IT failings and failed to make the bookings you wanted to make before the devaluation set in, you probably have no one but yourself to blame.

More importantly, it looks like the outage only affected a period of hours late yesterday evening and the devaluation didn’t kick in until 9am ET today, so even if you were affected last night, there was still time to get up early this morning and get those bookings made (I was browsing the Hyatt website for a few hours leading up to 9am ET and I didn’t spot any booking issues).

VFTW says that Hyatt failed “to allow members to spend their points“. I say that most members caught up in this were the ones who failed. They failed to plan and they failed to make the most of the ample time they were given to get their bookings made.

VFTW says that it “wasn’t true” that Hyatt gave members “until 9 a.m. Eastern on May 20th to book under prior pricing” but given that members appear to have been able to make bookings in the hours leading up to 9am today, that seems like a strange accusation to make.

Had there been a 3 hour outage on, say, 23 March, would that also means that Hyatt had not kept to what it told us in its announcement? Of course not!

VFTW calls what happened yesterday evening a “rug pull” and says that Hyatt should give affected members an extension.

I’m sorry Garry, but that’s nonsense. There was no “rug pull”. And there’s no reason for an extension.

I’m usually one of the first in line to attack the rewards programs, the airlines and the hotels when they act in poor faith (I have no bridges to burn so I don’t care who I annoy or upset with what I say and type), but not every issue can be laid at the door of the corporations.

Yes, there was a period of time yesterday evening when some members could not make award bookings on the Hyatt website and yes, Hyatt’s IT should probably be a bit more robust, but given that members had already been given 12 weeks to make what bookings they wanted to make, that’s hardly a reason to demand an extension.

The fact is that there’s an ever increasing number of people in the world who don’t like to take ownership of their mistakes and an ever increasing number of people who blame everyone but themselves when things don’t work out as they’d like them to.

It’s time we stopped pandering to this group, and we can start by telling anyone who failed to get their award bookings done on time and who is now blaming Hyatt for the position they find themselves in, to take a much closer look at themselves and to stop whining.

There are a lot of people in this world who deserve our sympathy, but this group isn’t among them.