Ask a luxury-minded globetrotter to name their favorite hotel brands and chances are you’ll hear some combination of the following names: Four Seasons Resort & Club, Aman Resorts Group Ltd., Marriott International Inc.’s Luxury Collection and the Ritz Carlton Hotel Co.
LLC, or Rosewood Hotels & Resorts LLC. Now, Hilton Hotels Worldwide Holdings Inc. is doing its best to get on that list.
Some loyalists would say it already belongs there — if only for its best-known Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts and Conrad Hotels & Resorts brands. But even Hilton’s top brass concedes that the hotel behemoth’s reputation lies mainly with road warriors rather than luxury seekers. While Marriott has been busy expanding into luxury all-inclusive resorts in the Caribbean and Ritz-Carlton yachts, Hilton has spent the past year focusing on new corporate-leaning brands, such as Tempo by Hilton.
“Here’s the irony — Hilton didn’t have a full category’s worth of luxury brands a few years ago,” says Dino Michael, senior vice president and global head of Hilton’s luxury brands. “But if you look back before today’s proliferation of luxury brands, Hilton was the international hotel brand,” he says, citing its prominence from the 1950s to 1970s. “We have legitimacy in this space, we just changed focus for a while.
” That’s what Hilton is aggressively pushing to change. The corporate hospitality giant has been on an acquisition and partnership spree to expand its luxury li.