IHG removes Mr & Mrs Smith boutique hotels from its website after Hyatt acquisition

Hyatt recently announced the acquisition of the Mr & Mrs Smith hotel booking platform.

The cost is £53 million, reflecting the ‘asset light’ nature of the acquisition (ie the company doesn’t actually own any hotels, although it does have 100 staff).

Participating hotels from the 1,500 bookable via Mr & Mrs Smith will appear on hyatt.com and will presumably be ‘earn and burn’ partners for World of Hyatt points.

The deal completed a few days, and IHG One Rewards has moved quickly to separate from the group.

The IHG website now says:

“We are no longer accepting bookings for stays at Mr & Mrs Smith properties. If you already have an upcoming reservation confirmed, your booking will not be affected and you will still be eligible to earn points on the stay. You can review and manage your reservation in your IHG One Rewards account and on the IHG One Rewards app.​”

Whilst a blow for IHG (Mr & Mrs Smith took the group into 14 new countries), this is actually a better result than I expected.

When a hotel leaves a brand, you usually see two things happen:

• existing points bookings are cancelled
• existing cash bookings no longer earn points or status benefits

IHG has done neither of these things:

• existing redemptions are protected
• existing cash bookings will still earn IHG One Rewards credit

There was very little in the way of IHG status recognition at Mr & Mrs Smith so this won’t be missed.

When will Mr & Mrs Smith hotels join World of Hyatt?

It’s not yet clear when the Smith hotels will be added to the Hyatt website.

Hyatt said in a statement when the deal was initially announced:

“We are excited by this planned acquisition and to explore bringing guests and World of Hyatt members even more global luxury offerings across hundreds of geographies – including over 20 countries where there are currently no Hyatt hotels such as Fiji, Croatia, Iceland and Anguilla.

Founders Tamara and James Lohan alongside their impressive team have built the ultimate global direct booking collection of truly unique stay experiences including rooms located in treehouses, within caves, and underwater suites. Importantly, we see a lot of synergy between our collective ethos of care, and we look forward to working together to bring our shared focus to new, memorable stay experiences for guests and World of Hyatt members – and introduce new guests to Hyatt hotels around the world.”

There are apparently 1 million ‘members’ of the Mr & Mrs Smith booking club, which Hyatt hopes to leverage into World of Hyatt.

We’ll let you know when they appear. Hyatt has an existing deal on a similar basis with Small Luxury Hotels so it knows how to put such a partnership together.

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