In December 2017, I made seven predictions relating to what I thought 2018 would bring when it came to credit cards and hotel loyalty schemes.
Despite only getting a couple of those predictions correct, I figured I’d see if I could do better for the coming year. I’ve therefore published below my credit card, airline and hotel loyalty scheme predictions for 2019.
Some of these are educated guesses. Others are pure speculation, but which are (hopefully) based on some kind of valid reasoning, even if they don’t come to fruition. It would be lovely if some of the dreams on my 2019 hotel wishlist come true as well!
1) Hyatt Will Devalue Award Nights
I pray this one doesn’t happen as we get so many free nights on our 50 state road trip thanks to Hyatt’s generous award night pricing.
Award nights range from 5,000 points per night for a category 1 property up to 30,000 points for a category 7 property. They’ve introduced a category 8/40,000 point level, but that’s currently only incorporating their partner Small Luxury Hotel properties.
The devaluation would likely come in one of two forms. They could move numerous properties up a category level which would make those hotels more expensive for award nights. Alternatively, they might choose to increase the cost of each category level, so a 5,000 point per night redemption costs something like 6,000 points per night.
To give you an idea of how good a deal the World of Hyatt program offers, we’ll compare to Marriott Rewards and IHG Rewards Club. All three are transfer partners of Chase Ultimate Rewards, although Hyatt tends to be the only hotel program that offers worthwhile value for transfers.
Shae and I are celebrating our 15th anniversary in 2019 by staying at the Hyatt Regency Bali for 10 nights. It’s in Bali, it’s next to the beach, it’s just been refurbished having closed for a year or two, but it costs just 5,000 points per night. I therefore only had to transfer 50,000 Ultimate Rewards points to my Hyatt account to book our 10 night stay.
For comparison, you could only get 2-3 free nights for that price with Marriott (or no free nights at all if staying at the W)…
…or only 1-2 free nights with IHG if you want to stay at a beachfront hotel.
It’s been several years since Hyatt made any significant changes to their category levels, so 2019 could be the year that happens again.
2) Hyatt Will Introduce A 4th Or 5th Night Free Benefit On Award Stays
This prediction piggybacks off my first prediction so if that doesn’t happen, I suspect this one will be wrong too. If Hyatt does devalue award nights, I suspect they’ll do something to try mitigating the outcry. One option would be to introduce a 4th or 5th night free benefit for award stays.
All the other major hotel chains offer something similar to some extent:
- IHG gives the 4th night free for members who have their new credit card.
- Marriott offers the 5th night free to all its members
- Hilton offers the 5th night free to members with Silver status or above. You can get Silver status with their no annual fee credit card, so it’s easily attainable.
If Hyatt was to introduce this after devaluing free night awards, I suspect it’d do little to quell the outcry. I imagine a lot of people only book award stays for one or two nights, so a 4th or 5th night free wouldn’t benefit them.
For Shae and I, it could work out in our favor. If they increased category 1 stays from 5,000 points to 6,000 points and introduced a 5th night free benefit, a five night stay under the new setup would cost us 24,000 points versus 25,000 points at present. A 4th night free benefit would be even better, as that’d cost 18,000 points versus 20,000 points at present.
3) Avianca LifeMiles Will Become A Chase Transfer Partner
In November 2018, American Express added Avianca LifeMiles as a Membership Rewards transfer partner. That means the LifeMiles program is now a transfer partner of Amex Membership Rewards, Citi ThankYou, Marriott Rewards and Capital One.
Those are all of the main transferable currencies with one exception – Chase Ultimate Rewards. I’m therefore predicting that Chase will add LifeMiles as another of its transfer partners in 2019.
4) United And/Or American Airlines Will Introduce Basic Economy Awards
I’d be very surprised if this one wasn’t true by the end of 2019. The big three US airlines (American, United and Delta) all offer Basic Economy fares. With Basic Economy you can’t choose your seat, have no carry-on allowance other than a personal item (e.g. purse, laptop bag, etc.) and other restrictions.
At the beginning of December 2018, Delta introduced Basic Economy award flights on some routes. The three airlines tend to copy customer-unfriendly policies from each other, so I’m predicting either United or American Airlines – or both – will introduce Basic Economy award flights as well.
5) Chase Offers Will Start Offering Bonus Points/Miles
A few months ago, Chase rolled out Chase Offers to all their personal cards. It’s somewhat similar to how many Amex Offers work, in that you load an offer for a certain retailer to your credit card and you receive a statement credit when making a purchase with them.
Some Amex Offers work differently though. If you have a card that earns Membership Rewards, you might see an offer giving bonus Membership Rewards rather than a statement credit. For example, there’s currently a Saks Amex Offer that gives you either a $50 statement credit or 5,000 Membership Rewards when spending $250.
My prediction regarding Chase Offers is that they’ll do something similar. It might be that they offer a set number of miles/points when spending a certain amount like the Saks Amex Offer shown above.
More likely though would be that they’d offer a bonus multiple up to a certain level of spend. For example, earn 10x miles/points on up to $100 at a retailer. This latter option would be more in keeping with how Chase Offers currently run, plus it’s similar to how Chase Pay promotions work.
If they do introduce offers like this, I’m guessing they’d trial it first on their own cards that award Ultimate Rewards points (e.g. Sapphire Reserve, Freedom, etc.), rather than their co-branded cards (IHG, Marriott, Hyatt, etc.).
6) Hilton To Introduce Some Kind Of Award Sales
IHG has PointBreaks, a list of hotels published every 2-3 months that only cost 5,000-15,000 points per night. Marriott has PointSavers, hotels that temporarily cost less for award nights. American Airlines has both Reduced Mileage Awards and Economy Web Specials. Delta runs weekly award flash sales. Flying Blue (the loyalty scheme for both Air France and KLM) offers monthly Promo Rewards.
It therefore wouldn’t surprise me if more airlines or hotel chains start offering similar award sales. My specific prediction for 2019 is that Hilton will join the fray and offer reduced priced award nights for stays at some of their properties. They already offer dynamic pricing of award nights, but this will be something different to that.
7) Marriott Will Continue Offering Lackluster Promotions
Over the past year, Marriott has offered some lackluster promotions. Their MegaBonus promotions are undeserving of the ‘Mega’ prefix seeing as they often award just 2,000 points per stay, regardless of your length of stay.
I write part-time over at Frequent Miler and have published a couple of posts (here and here) this year analyzing how rewarding each hotel chain’s promotions are. In both instances, Marriott offered some of the least rewarding promotions.
Their merger with SPG hasn’t gone amazingly and technical problems have continued for months on end. In theory, you’d think they’d offer some rewarding promotions to encourage loyalty through their issues, but I don’t hold out much hope for that.
Instead, I’m anticipating that they’ll continue offering unrewarding MegaBonus promotions that’ll do nothing to encourage people to book stays with them.
Question
Those are my seven predictions for 2019 relating to credit cards, airlines and hotel loyalty schemes, but how about you? What changes do you foresee happening over the coming year? Let me know in the comments below.
Abey says
First time poster, long time poster on Doc, didn’t know about your blog until doc posted a link to your predictions.
Have to say after reading all links with other blogs predictions, i’m impressed with your well thought off predictions, especially the Hyatt ones.
And they’re more then just interesting guesses, they’re what we know will happen, the question is just when but not so much if…
stephen says
Thanks! I’ve a feeling I’ll get more wrong than correct this year, but like you said, it’s likely that the majority of these changes will happen at some point – it’s just a question of when.