MarshKing

I would agree that the majority of Hyatts do not fall into the luxury category, and if all Hyatts were part of Virtuoso, I would scratch my head and wonder why. That said, there are currently only 33 Hyatts that are affiliated with Virtuoso -- roughly 6.7% of the 492 Hyatts worldwide.

A couple points of comparison:

• There are also 33 Hyatts that are affiliated with AmEx's FHR program.
• When looking at % of properties that are tied to Virtuoso, Hyatt's 6.7% is far more than Hilton's 0.3% (11/3800), but is less than Starwood's 8% (79 out of 992).

I wonder if it is an issue of semantics. For the most part, hotels (whether they are affiliated with Virtuoso or not) pay travel agencies a 10% commission. (That commission is then split between the agency and the agent -- but that is for a different thread.) That 10% has little/nothing to do with Virtuoso.

The part that I do not have a lot of insight on is the fee structure that a property agrees to when they join Virtuoso (or Signature, FHR, Ensemble, etc.). I believe that there is an annual fee, but I am not aware of revenue sharing. If we assume the annual fee exists, and a property were to distribute that fee across all Virtuoso bookings, then they could say that they're paying a % of revenue to Virtuoso for the bookings. When added to the 10% that they already pay agencies, perhaps a small property could wind up having to essentially pay 25% - 30%.

I remember similar conversations about Leading Hotels of the World program. I believe (again, I'm not certain on this) that they do charge % of sales, but LHW also provides extra service for the properties, such as listing them in the GDS. (Some LHW properties are already in the GDS, but not all of them.)

Agreed. Ultimately, if these programs (Virtuoso, FHR, LHW, etc.) had no value-add for properties, then very few properties would be members.