There are three main “fancy” hotel programs: American Express Fine Hotels & Resorts, Visa Signature Hotels and Virtuoso. There are roughly 2,000 hotels that participate in those programs, offering amenities and benefits to guests who book through the appropriate channel. And figuring out which hotel is in which program is mostly annoying. More to the point, figuring out if a hotel is in multiple programs is annoying as it requires searching all three sites.
Or you could just search one site instead.
I’ve consolidated all the properties into a single database and cleaned up some of the inconsistencies in the names such that I can now map all of them and show where a particular hotel might participate in all of the programs or only one of them. There are still a few gaps in the data but it is pretty close to complete, enough such that I’m willing to share it in public.
If you look at the map of Amsterdam above you’ll see 7 participating properties. Four of them participate in all three programs as shown by the icon having all three colors in it. The two on the left only participate in one program while Intercontinental Amstel in the bottom right participates in both Viruoso and the AmEx FHR program.
Here’s the breakdown I’ve come up with of distribution of hotels by program:
| Virtuoso | 544 |
| Visa Sig | 524 |
| FHR+Virtuoso | 312 |
| AmEx FHR | 263 |
| All Three | 181 |
| Visa+Virtuoso | 145 |
| Visa+AmEx | 65 |
Right now the site just loads up all the hotels and then you can zoom/scroll/browse to find what you’re looking for. Using the “find” feature in your browser should help find things in the text list on the side of the page. It is moderately ugly, just like all my other tools. And mostly functional, again just like all the others.
Any other features you’d like to see added? Very unlikely that I’ll be able to harvest the local benefits/amenities data so don’t expect that to be listed (though I agree it’d be cool). Also, rates and booking links (like on Hotel Hustle) isn’t gonna happen since that data isn’t easy. I was thinking things like type-down on airport names to zoom in quickly to an area or something like that if it is better than the main map. But I’m not so sure the value proposition is there unless y’all think it is very useful.
Also, if you like the new feature let @RafLip know. It was his idea in the first place. And I initially said no, then did it anyways.
@WandrMe any way to search by hotel name which programs they use? FHR/Virtuoso/Visa Signature?
— Raf Lip (@RafLip) December 5, 2016
Turns out I’m rather easily suggestable when things pique my curiosity. This isn’t the only tool that was born out of similar requests from users.
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I really like this new hotel website. Thank you for creating it!
I checked some of my favorite cities and noticed some entries need to be combined:
The Joule + The Joule, Dallas
The Pierre, a Taj Hotel, New York + The Pierre
The St Regis New York + The St. Regis New York (with a period)
Palace Hotel + The Lotte New York Palace
The Chatwal, a Luxury Collection Hotel, New York City + The Chatwal
The Baglioni London+ Baglioni Hotel London
Hotel Eden + Hotel Eden Rome
The St Regis Rome + The St. Regis Rome
Rome Cavalieri + Rome Cavalieri, Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts
Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, London + Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park
The Connaught + Connaught
Rocco Forte Hotel Amigo + Hotel Amigo
Le Royal Monceau – Raffles Paris + Le Royal Monceau Raffles Paris
Hotel Castello di Casole, A Timbers Resort + Hotel Castello Di Casole
J.K. Place Firenze (purple color) + J.K.Place (purple color)
Hotel Hassler + Hotel Hassler Roma + Hassler Roma
Yup….those all look like they should be combined. I pulled ~100 together yesterday before publishing it but knew I’d miss a few. I’ll get those done shortly.
Wow Seth, you are the man! You’ve made so many wonderfully useful travel tools, and kindly shared them with the public! Many thanks!
solid work, thanks seth 🙂
Here’s a few more:
The Carneros Resort & Spa + Carneros Resort & Spa
The Canyon Suites at The Phoenician + The Canyon Suites at The Phoenician, a Luxury Collection Resort, Scottsdale
The Arrabelle At Vail Square + RockResorts – The Arrabelle at Vail Square
The Ritz-Carlton, Key Biscayne + The Ritz-Carlton Key Biscayne
Carillon Miami Wellness Resort + The Carillon Hotel & Spa
Boca Raton Resort & Club + Boca Raton Resort
XV Beacon Hotel + Fifteen Beacon
Thanks Seth! Great Job!
Great idea, thanks Seth. Just FYI, you’re capturing less than half of the Virtuoso preferred hotels. One other idea would be adding Starwood Luxury Privileges designation.
I pulled the list of Virtuoso hotels directly from the company’s website. There are 1182 in the list. Are you saying that’s incomplete? If so, where are the other 1200 listed?
One more idea – Leading Hotels of the World
LHW hotels are in the database and the graphics are updated. Dunno if the choice I made for that really works, but it is the choice I made. 🙂
Really solid work!
Gracias!
It’s a fantastic resource. Is there a way to search a specific city, rather than scrolling and zooming?
I’m a newbie to these programs but do have the Visa Signature card and do get their emails. For myself and any other newbies, can you spell out why knowing that these hotels are in several programs is useful. Are people double dipping on benefits? Thanks for all the work you did.
Awesome!
Wow… excellent. Any chance of adding Chase Fine Hotels?
Is that different from the Visa Signature hotels?
Yes, similar benefits to Amex Fine Hotels:
https://www.lhrcollection.com/
Official name is Luxury Hotel and Resort Collection.
Awesome tool
Sorry if I’m just dense and missing it somewhere but is there a key for which colors belong to which program?
That’s completely my fault. I pulled the key out during some testing and forgot to put it back in. I’ve fixed that now.