Hyatt launched their earning and redemption partnership with Small Luxury Hotels of the World at the end of 2018. Initially they only brought about 10% of SLH’s 500+ properties into their portfolio.

They followed two months later with another 56 properties or 10% and then 57 more a month after that.

Now they’ve added another tranche of hotels where you can earn and redeem Hyatt points, bringing them to over 200 (or roughly 40% of) SLH properties in the portfolio.

• There are some incredible hotels
  
• It adds significantly to Hyatt’s footprint of about 700 of its own hotels, plus now Thompson Hotels and Joie de Vivre Hotels with Destination Hotels and Alila to come later this year.

Credit: On the Rocks, Santorini

However there are two drawbacks as I see them.

1. They do not offer a best rate guarantee for SLH Hotels reservations. You have to book through Hyatt to earn World of Hyatt points with your reservation, but should check whether you’re overpaying in order to do so.

2. Many of these hotels are expensive redemptions relative to their paid rates. Hyatt even created a new 40,000 points per night category 8 for the top hotels, which often aren’t more expensive than Hyatt’s own properties. I surmise, then, that Hyatt must be paying SLH properties more than comparable Hyatt hotels to compensate for points stays. As a result many properties seem overindexed on the award chart.

Still, more choices are always better and this does open up some incredible spots for using Hyatt points so there’s no question this is a positive development. Hopefully they’ll continue apace quickly onboarding additional SLH hotels quickly.

Here are the SLH Hotels that have just been added in this fourth batch: