It was a Tuesday evening in late October when Marcus Chen, 34, finally pulled up the Hyatt property he’d been mentally booking for three years.

Eighty thousand points. That’s what he had. Three years of work travel, of choosing the loyalty property over the convenient one, of skipping upgrades so the points could stack. He typed in the Kyoto dates. Cherry blossom season. The number that came back stopped him cold: 95,000 points for a standard room, up from 60,000 when he’d first priced it out. His 80,000 wasn’t a booking. It was a down payment on disappointment.

Here’s what the guidebooks do not tell you: your loyalty balance hasn’t changed, but what it can actually buy has been quietly renegotiated without your signature on anything.

The Devaluation Nobody Announces

According to a 2024 analysis by The Points Guy, the average hotel loyalty point lost between 35 and 42 percent of its redemption value over the previous 18 months. That’s not a rounding error. That’s nearly half your accumulated reward, dissolved through a combination of category restructuring, dynamic pricing rollouts, and point-cost inflation that chains implement with a press release most travelers never read.

When did you last check what your points are actually worth today versus when you earned them?

Marriott Bonvoy executed a sweeping category overhaul in early 2023, moving hundreds of properties into higher tiers. IHG One Rewards shifted to dynamic pricing in 2022, meaning the cost of a redemption night now fluctuates with demand, the same way airfare does. Hilton Honors followed with similar adjustments. The result is a system where your balance looks identical on the app but your purchasing power has been quietly renegotiated. Your screen shows the same number. The hotel charges a different one.

Did You Know: Marriott’s 2023 category restructuring moved over 1,400 properties into higher point tiers, according to a March 2023 report by The Points Guy. Some flagship urban properties jumped two full categories overnight — no grandfathering, no grace period.

Marcus Isn’t Alone

I made this mistake so you do not have to. I held onto 60,000 IHG points for 14 months, watching a specific Edinburgh property I wanted, telling myself I’d book “when the trip came together.” By the time I was ready, dynamic pricing had pushed that property to 70,000 on the dates I needed. Points are not a savings account. They’re a currency with an invisible inflation rate that only the issuer controls.

The behavior that created Marcus’s situation is almost universal among frequent travelers. A 2023 survey by loyalty analytics firm Switchfly found that 61 percent of loyalty program members hold points for more than 12 months before attempting a redemption. Meanwhile, programs restructure pricing an average of 1.3 times per year. The math is not in your favor if you’re holding and waiting.

Warning: Most hotel loyalty programs include an inactivity clause. Wyndham Rewards cancels all points after 18 months of account inactivity. Marriott Bonvoy expires points after 24 months without a qualifying earn or redemption. Have you logged into your Wyndham or Marriott account in the last 12 months? If you haven’t touched the account, your balance may already be at zero.

Dynamic Pricing Is the Mechanism, Not the Villain

It helps to understand exactly how the erosion happens, because “devaluation” sounds like a single dramatic event. It isn’t. It’s a slow process with three distinct levers.

Category restructuring is the bluntest instrument. Chains assign properties to tiers with fixed or capped point costs. When a property moves from Category 4 to Category 6, the point cost jumps by a defined amount — typically 20 to 40 percent. No announcement necessary beyond a policy page update.

Dynamic pricing is subtler and, for frequent travelers, more dangerous. When a chain eliminates fixed category redemptions and replaces them with demand-based pricing, there’s no longer a ceiling on what a popular property can cost. A room that was 40,000 points on a fixed chart can become 80,000 points during a peak travel week. The program hasn’t technically changed. The cost has simply doubled.

Point earn rate erosion is the third lever and the one most people miss entirely. When credit card partners reduce earn multipliers, or when the base earn rate per dollar spent at a property drops, the velocity of accumulation slows while costs continue rising. You’re earning less and paying more. The gap compounds quietly.

This connects directly to a pattern that What Mia Found at 2AM About Her Favorite Brand documented with retail loyalty programs: the terms of your loyalty are unilateral. The brand sets the price. You accepted that when you joined.

The Regional Program Exception

Here’s where the story turns useful, because there is a corner of the loyalty market that hasn’t followed the major chains down the dynamic pricing path. Yet.

Smaller regional programs — World of Hyatt’s boutique property tier, Best Western Rewards, and Sonesta Travel Pass among them — have maintained more stable redemption charts. World of Hyatt in particular has held its category structure with fewer disruptive overhauls than Marriott or Hilton, and its top-end redemptions remain more predictably priced relative to the cash value of a stay.

This is a direct extension of something How Small Programs Beat Blue Bloods in the Portal (3 Steps) makes the case for at length: the advantage of a smaller program isn’t prestige, it’s predictability. When a program has fewer properties and a tighter footprint, there’s less economic pressure to implement dynamic pricing overnight. The currency is more stable because the market is smaller.

I’ve been to 40 countries. This surprised me: one of my highest-value redemptions in the last two years was through Best Western’s program at a property in Porto that would have cost 65,000 Hilton points. I paid 16,000 Best Western Rewards points. The room was identical in quality. The difference was entirely about which program’s math I’d learned to use.

Pro Tip: World of Hyatt’s off-peak pricing is still category-based, not demand-based, for most properties. If you’re targeting a Hyatt property, book during Hyatt’s designated off-peak dates — those dates are published on their award calendar and can reduce your point cost by 20 to 33 percent per night, per Hyatt’s official award chart.

How to Protect What You Have Left

The instinct after reading this is often to cash out everything immediately. That’s not the move either. Panic-redeeming points for low-value options — airline amenity kits, hotel gift shop vouchers — guarantees a bad outcome. The goal is strategic deployment before the next restructuring, not a fire sale.

Check the earn date on your oldest points first. That’s where expiration risk lives. Then identify your one or two target properties and price them today, not in six months. The cost you see now is the baseline. Assume it will be higher in a year. And if you’re more than 18 months from a realistic redemption, consider whether a small qualifying purchase can reset your inactivity clock before the program does it for you.

If you’re also carrying financial obligations that are eating into your travel budget, The Breakup Clause Costing Renters Thousands is worth reading alongside this — the hidden cost logic is structurally identical, and fixing one frees up capacity for the other.

Your Next 3 Steps

Step 1: Log into every hotel loyalty account you hold today — not this weekend, today — and screenshot your current balance and the expiration date listed in your account settings. Then open AwardWallet’s free tracker, enter each program, and pull the current point cost for the one property you’ve been mentally targeting. Write that number down next to what you estimated it would cost. That gap is your devaluation number.

Step 2: Set two calendar reminders right now. The first repeats every 90 days with one task: recheck your target property’s current point cost and category status. The second fires at the 11-month mark from your last qualifying account activity, flagging you to make one small purchase through that program before the 12-month inactivity window can close around your balance.

Step 3: Spend 20 minutes this week looking up one regional program from a chain you’ve actually stayed with in the last two years. Log in, verify your balance is active, and run your target destination through their award search. Identify whether a free night certificate is within 15,000 points of your current balance. If it is, you have a concrete, short-term target — and that’s more valuable than a vague someday redemption that loses value every quarter you wait.

Marcus eventually booked Kyoto. He switched to a Hyatt property on off-peak dates, used 60,000 points, and had 20,000 left over. It cost him eight weeks of research he didn’t expect to need. Don’t let the programs do your math for you.