Originally Posted by
factory81
If you think of the annual nights as pre-paid..or paid for with your hotels annual fee - you may feel more comfortable about carrying around 3-4 hotel cards. Like I said, you can take those 3 or 4 prepaid nights, double up with your spouse and turn them into 6 or 8 prepaid nights. And you can piece together some pretty decent vacations with these annual free nights - you just end up hotel hopping every day or two.
I think that Hyatt has a terrible selection in Europe. To the point where it is worthless to consider them outside of 3 cities. I have been looking at what works for me in Europe quite a bit - and Marriott/SPG are really the best candidates there. They literally have zero hotels in Spain, one in Italy, a few in France, a few in Germany.
If I had to pick 3 that would cover the worldddddddd round - I would go IHG + SPG + Marriott. IHG and Marriott are just monsters.
I recently decided to try out IHG especially because of their footprint. Marriott has a huge number of properties, but 3/4 of the properties are in North America. Just like Starwood, They're very weak in the Nordic countries and Eastern Europe.
The problem with IHG is I would rate their properties more on par with Accor than SPG - HI is pretty bad and CP varies quite a lot. SPG is definitely a notch higher - IHG only really have one worthwhile brand - the IC.