Alright, let's talk about curses. Because I’m starting to think the Hyatt hotel brand is operating under some kind of ancient hex. Or maybe it just stepped on a cosmic crack in the sidewalk. Either way, the last week has been a string of events so bizarrely grim that you have to wonder if someone at corporate headquarters broke a mirror while walking under a ladder carrying a black cat.
It started quietly, as these things often do. On Thursday, October 9th, two unrelated obituaries popped up. One for Lisa Jo Hyatt, 56, in South Carolina. The other for Roger Nels Hyatt, 77, in Minnesota. Same day, same last name. Look, I get it, Hyatt is a name. People have it. But on the same day? In the prelude to what came next? It just feels… weird. Like the opening scene of a horror movie where the audience knows something is wrong, but the characters are still blissfully making toast.
Then, just two days later, the universe decided to stop whispering and start screaming. A helicopter, part of some "Cars N' Copters" event—which sounds like the kind of thing a 12-year-old boy would invent—fell out of the sky in Huntington Beach. It slammed into a pedestrian bridge, injuring five people. And where did the wreckage finally come to a rest? You get one guess. It was, and I quote, "wedged inside trees against the front of the Hyatt Regency Hotel."
Are you kidding me? A helicopter literally uses your hotel as a backstop, and we're all supposed to just move on? This ain't a seagull stealing a french fry from the pool deck. This is a flying metal machine of death crashing into your front yard.
The Tone-Deaf Fanfare in Times Square
You'd think, with all this bad mojo swirling around, a company might lay low. Read the room. Maybe burn some sage in the boardroom. But not Hyatt. No, while fate was seemingly trying to send a message via falling aircraft, Hyatt was busy popping champagne corks in New York City. On October 8th, just one day before the ominous obituaries, they swung open the doors to the brand-new Hyatt Regency Times Square.
This isn't just any hotel; it's the first Hyatt Regency in NYC, a massive 795-room behemoth carved out of the corpse of an old Crowne Plaza. And they are so proud of it. The press release stuff talks about "clean, uncluttered lines" and art "inspired by the Broadway theater marquees." Translation: it’s another sterile, beige box with some colorful plastic glued to the walls to make you feel like you’re having an "authentic" New York experience.
And get this—the hotel's main restaurant isn't even open yet. They launched a flagship property in the busiest city on earth, and you can’t even get a proper meal. A First look inside new Hyatt Regency Times Square — NYC's first Hyatt Regency property from The Points Guy confirmed the reviewer had to DoorDash dinner to his room. This is a bad look. No, "bad" doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of corporate planning. They're charging nearly $300 a night (or a laughable 21,000 points), slapping on a $46 "destination fee" for the privilege of a Citi Bike pass you won't use, and they can't even serve you a hamburger.
What kind of message does that send? It sends the message that they don't care about the actual guest experience, only the booking confirmation. It’s like a car dealership selling you a new convertible but telling you the engine will be installed sometime next quarter.
A Desperate Bribe to Look Away
And just to complete this trifecta of terrible timing, what else is Hyatt pushing right now? A New Chase Offer for 10% Cash-Back at Hyatt Centric [Targeted]. It feels less like a promotion and more like a bribe. "Please, sir, here's a fifty-dollar credit. Pay no attention to the wreckage being cleared from our lawn or the faint sound of Taps playing in the distance."
This is the corporate playbook in a nutshell. When reality gets messy, just throw some points at it. Distract everyone with a shiny new loyalty offer so they don't notice the foundational cracks. Hyatt has become the Wile E. Coyote of the hospitality world, constantly rolling out elaborate new schemes while the universe drops another anvil on its head. They’re so focused on optimizing their portfolio, managing their World of Hyatt credit card partnerships, and classifying hotels into categories that they’ve completely lost the plot.
I’m not saying there’s an actual curse. Offcourse not. But when a brand has a week this bad—a week that combines genuine tragedy, spectacular disaster, and tone-deaf corporate spectacle—it stops being a coincidence. It’s a symptom of something deeper. A sign that maybe, just maybe, you’ve focused so much on the "business" of hospitality that you’ve forgotten how to be human.
So, Is Anyone Actually in Charge Here?
Let's be real. This isn't about ghosts or voodoo dolls. It's about a series of catastrophic PR failures, one after another, that paint a picture of a company that's just… not paying attention. You have a helicopter crash at your hotel, and your big news is a half-finished tourist trap in Times Square with a ridiculous resort fee. It’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder if the entire executive team was on vacation. Maybe I’m the crazy one, but if I were running a global hotel chain, I might have put a pin in the party planning when one of my properties became part of an NTSB investigation. But hey, what do I know? I'm just the guy who thinks you should probably have a functioning restaurant before you call yourself a premium hotel.
