Dive Brief:
- Hyatt has added more than 700 boutique and luxury hotels and villas from the Mr & Mrs Smith platform to its portfolio, the company announced Wednesday.
- The partnership with Mr & Mrs Smith — first announced in a $66.6 million deal last year — adds more than 20 new countries to Hyatt’s World of Hyatt loyalty program, including Namibia, Fiji and the British Virgin Islands.
- The addition of Mr & Mrs Smith properties comes a month before Small Luxury Hotels of the World leave Hyatt’s network on May 15. SLH will work in an exclusive partnership with Hilton instead.
Dive Insight:
Hyatt first partnered with SLH in 2018 to bring its 500-plus hotels — most of which are in Europe — onto its platforms. Mr & Mrs Smith’s 700 hotels and villas, meanwhile, could more than make up for the gaps left behind by the end of Hyatt’s relationship with SLH.
“While this relationship may be ending, we're excited to share the news that Mr & Mrs Smith, a highly curated collection of boutique and luxury hotels, will soon participate in World of Hyatt,” reads a March announcement about the partnership’s end.
Hyatt announced that its relationship with SLH was ending shortly after Hilton announced an exclusive partnership with the brand in February. Though Hyatt had already announced its partnership with Mr & Mrs Smith at the time, it had not announced that its SLH deal was ending.
In a fourth-quarter earnings call that month, Hilton CEO Chris Nassetta said the SLH partnership could take Hilton’s “150-, 160-hotel luxury portfolio and turn it into six or seven hundred,” and earlier this week, Nassetta said a “very very high percentage of SLH members” have already signed up to join Hilton’s network. SLH could not be reached for comment.
A travel club platform that allows guests direct booking access to a curated collection of luxury and boutique hotels, Mr & Mrs Smith-approved properties include wellness-oriented hotels, glamping sites, ski resorts and country manors. Hyatt expects to continue adding more Mr & Mrs Smith hotels to its platform on a quarterly basis, a Hyatt spokesperson told Hotel Dive.
“The Mr & Mrs Smith curation team is constantly on the lookout for new hotels and often adds over 30 hotels to their platform each month, some of which will in turn join World of Hyatt,” the spokesperson shared.
Hyatt has doubled its number of luxury rooms in the past five years, with luxury, lifestyle and resort hotels now making up over 40% of Hyatt's portfolio, according to a September release.
For Hyatt, the addition of Mr & Mrs Smith-curated hotels complements the company’s growing pipeline of more than 35 new luxury properties across its Timeless, Boundless, Independent and Inclusive Collection brands, as Hyatt “doubles down on caring for today’s luxury travelers,” the company said.
