a few weeks ago, i commented on united's devaluing of their award chart. but then on flyertalk, there were a few more devaluations being written about:
1) hyatt gold passport had revamped its award chart on november 10, 2013, pushing 21 hotels into higher award categories and 17 hotels into lower ones. but they also changed the amounts required to redeem within each category. details can be found in the flyertalk thread here.
2) alaska airlines makes a small devaluation of their award chart on november 13, 2013. flight awards went up for their last seat availability awards. while these awards are not as valuable, they did guaranteed a maximum number of points that could be redeemed for a guaranteed seat on the plane. air canada offers this too using aeroplan's market fares (previously known as classic plus). however, aeroplan does not set a maximum, and thus i've seen business class tickets being sold for over a million aeroplan points. it was blogged about here.
i'm not an active participant in either of these programs. i did write a while back about how alaska made a great back-up program in case one had to fly a non-star alliance carrier (or if they were forced to fly multiple carriers in different alliances). i still think that remains true. however, i haven't found myself in the position of having to credit anything to alaska airlines yet, and so this news doesn't affect me that much.
i've heard wonderful things about the hyatt gold passport program which seem to trump the benefits of starwood preferred guest. i'm not a member as hyatt has just half of the participating properties that starwood has (which already is limited), and there isn't a good credit card option for hyatt here in canada. therefore, i'm not an active member in their program.
all this being said, it just goes to show that devaluations happen everywhere and all of the time. and it's a good reminder that banking large amounts of miles hoping for them to increase in value is rarely a good strategy.
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