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🤙🏿 Welcome back to the Better Than Points Newsletter - the premier place for all things Credit Card Points News and Travel

My name’s Luis and I’m the one writing this (hit me up here!)

Hello from a conference here in Austin.

Funny enough, I’ve ran into some people who read the newsletter.

If you’re in Austin at the New Media Summit, stop by and say hey.

But enough about me.

We have some news this week, so let’s get to it!

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Each week, I’ll share something cool I’ve discovered or tackle a question from the community. It’s my little corner to explore ideas, offer fresh perspectives, and hopefully spark your own curiosity.

I’ve been talking to a lot of people the past few days, and if you were flying out of the East Coast, there’s a good chance you dealt with a delay.

Quick reminder: stay on top of your flight and watch how bad the delay is getting.

If it starts creeping into that 2 to 3 hour range, start looking at other options and see if you can get moved to a different flight.

This is where an app like Flighty is clutch.

It’ll often flag delays and cancellations before the airline app does.

Those extra 10 minutes you get before everyone else finds out is valuable time.

That’s when you can call in or walk up to the desk before the line turns into a mile long mess.

Also, be proactive.

Book multiple back up flights and keep rechecking full ones.

Don’t just call and say “my flight is delayed.”

Know what flight you want and have the flight number ready.

When you get a rep on the phone or at the kiosk, you’ve basically done the work for them.

The easier you make their job, the more likely you get a yes.

Especially if you’re dealing with tight connections.

Last week there was a Reddit post about “updates” coming to World of Hyatt that had a lot of people freaking out.

Someone later owned up to it and admitted it was basically an experiment to see if people would believe it.

And they did.

Unfortunately, real Hyatt news did drop, and the changes are coming in May 2026.

High level, Hyatt isn’t going full dynamic pricing, but they are making the pricing bands way more broken up, and not in a good way.

Right now we only have three buckets: off peak, standard, and peak.

Starting in May 2026, it moves to five buckets: lowest, low, moderate, upper, and top.

And while they’ll say it’s “not dynamic,” it kind of is.

You’re just widening the range inside each category.

For some properties and categories, the points required could jump by as much as 67%, which is insane.

That starts pushing Hyatt into the same territory as other hotel programs, and it hurts one of the main reasons Hyatt has been so valuable.

They haven’t shared a ton yet about how each category will map to those five buckets, but the early read is not great.

If you’ve got any Hyatt stays you know you want, I’d book them before May 2026.

If you haven’t been following the travel chaos this week, here’s the quick version.

DHS suspended TSA PreCheck and Global Entry earlier this week.

A few hours later they backtracked and removed the suspension.

So nothing is shut down right now, but it still feels like it could happen.

The bigger issue is the partial government shutdown going on right now.

DHS is one of the departments caught in it.

That means airport security workers are once again classified as essential, still working, and not getting paid.

If this shutdown drags longer than the last one, people start calling out because bills don’t stop.

And if staffing gets bad enough, DHS could start reallocating officers to the areas they consider most critical, which is where PreCheck and Global Entry will be impacted.

So if you’re traveling in the next couple months, keep this in mind.

Security lines are going to get a lot longer.

And even if PreCheck and Global Entry don’t “shut down,” they can effectively get slower and less reliable if the staffing situation keeps getting worse.

Delta’s running another flash sale right now, and of course it ends tonight, February 16.

It covers a bunch of routes to the Caribbean and Central America.

Most of the deals are round trip, and I’m seeing some East Coast to Caribbean options as low as 10,000 SkyMiles round trip, which is honestly pretty solid if you’ve got SkyMiles sitting around.

The downside it is economy only.

Check this link, plug in your home airport, and see what deals are showing for you before it disappears tonight.

Sample round trip prices include:

Check out this blog post for more routes.

These fares can only be found when searching roundtrip.

Check out these crazy award deals!

This section includes some of the best award flights of the week bookable with points and miles.

Chat with TravelBot - my AI clone. It’s trained on every newsletter I’ve published along with my 10+ years of points and credit card knowledge 🧠.

It’s also trained on my voice, so you can call it and have a full blown conversations. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

I got to meet Chandler Bolt at the conference today. He’s helped people publish over 7,000 books, and I’ve started watching a lot of his content to learn how to market my book. Really cool to meet him today.