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Hilton and Small Luxury Hotels of the World (SLH) have announced a new partnership which as the press release puts it, will ‘dramatically expand the luxury experiences offered by Hilton’ and will see SLH properties participating in the Hilton Honors program.
What we know
Today’s announcement doesn’t tell us much, but it does tell us this:
The deal between Hilton and SLH is exclusive (more on that in a moment) and that in the coming months, 560 SLH properties will be added to Hilton’s website and will be bookable with cash or Hilton Honors points.
We’re also told that stays made with SLH properties will earn Hilton Honors members points (and presumably, elite night credits), but we haven’t been told what this will look like.
More details will be given ‘soon’.
The Hyatt/SLH partnership is clearly over
Following Hyatt’s purchase of the Mr & Mrs Smith platform, we have been hearing rumors that a break-up with SLH was on the way and this seems to be the final confirmation. Hyatt’s relationship with SLH is now, effectively, over.
We didn’t need to be told that Hilton’s new relationship with SLH is exclusive to know that we should soon expect to see SLH properties being removed from the World of Hyatt and the Hyatt booking engine (there’s no way that SLH would partner with Hyatt and Hilton at the same time), it’s now just a matter of when and not if.
At the time of writing, I can still see SLH properties on the Hyatt website, and I can still make bookings at these properties through the end of the year, but I highly doubt that’s how things will remain.
I suspect that once the break-up with Hyatt is announced, existing cash bookings made at SLH properties through Hyatt will be honored, but guests shouldn’t expect to earn any Hyatt points or enjoy what limited extra benefits they would have been entitled to on that stay.
Award bookings may be treated differently (I don’t know), so if you have an SLH booking made with World of Hyatt points, I suggest you monitor that booking very carefully and if possible, make a back-up plan in case that booking gets cancelled.
Thoughts
It’s early days right now but we can still say that this is a blow for World of Hyatt fans and good news for Hilton Honors fans.
It will be interesting to see how quickly SLH properties are added to the Hilton booking engine as integrating these properties into the World of Hyatt was done in batches and took some time.
It will also be interesting to see what benefits Hilton Honors elites will be offered at SLH properties because the benefits that have been on offer on World of Hyatt bookings could hardly be described as generous. ‘Basic’ would probably be a good way of describing the elite benefits World of Hyatt elites have been entitled to at SLH properties.
Lastly, we now wait to see how many Hilton points will be needed to book these properties – probably quite a few.
Hyatt introduced a new top-tier category (Category 8) to accommodate some of the higher-end SLH properties, so Hilton Honors members should be under no illusions when it comes to how affordable (points-wise) some of the better SLH properties are likely to be.
Amusingly (if you have a slightly twisted sense of what’s funny), one of the lasting benefits that Hyatt will get out of the SLH partnership will be the World of Hyatt Category 8.
Hyatt used the higher-end SLH properties as an excuse to introduce a new top-tier category into the World of Hyatt, and after saying that its own properties wouldn’t be joining that category, it reversed that promise just a year later.
Now, Hyatt will soon lose access to all the properties for which Category 8 was created, and yet that Category will continue in existence with more and more Hyatt properties being added to it (and with World of Hyatt fans being charged more and more to stay at the best properties in the portfolio).
Looking at it that way, the only real losers today are World of Hyatt members.
Bottom line
Hilton and Small Luxury Hotels of the World have today announced an exclusive partnership which will see 560 SLH properties being integrated into the Hilton Honors program, and which will effectively end the Hyatt/SLH partnership.
We’ll publish more updates on what this new Hilton/SLH partnership will offer as and when that information is made available.
