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Which hotel brand is best, Park Hyatt or InterContinental? Certain cities and resorts house both a Park Hyatt and an InterContinental hotel. These locations include London, Paris, Seoul, Sydney, Chi Minh City, and New York. We outline your best option in each destination below.
Park Hyatt hotels tend to be more luxurious than InterContinental hotels, but they don’t usually have a club lounge. Both typically have excellent facilities, extensive grounds, spas, and often pools.
We have outlined the best Park Hyatt hotels and best InterContinental hotels in case you want to delve further into each hotel brand.
1. Loyalty
IHG has at least two reward schemes: IHG One Rewards is free to join and gives you access to exclusive member rates. It is relevant to all IHG brands, including Regent and Kimpton. You can earn points for reward nights, get free Wi-Fi, and have a better chance of getting late checkout. Plus, you get perks like bonus points, reward night discounts, welcome amenities, and milestone rewards.
IHG also has an InterContinental Ambassador, which is relevant only to InterContinental hotels and is a loyalty program that delivers benefits exclusively at InterContinental Hotels & Resorts properties worldwide. The benefits of InterContinental Ambassador membership are: guaranteed one category room upgrade, guaranteed extended 4:00 pm checkout, complimentary weekend night, Platinum Elite status in IGH One Rewards and the corresponding benefits, restaurant, and bar credit of USD20 for every stay, complimentary mineral water, complimentary internet, dedicated check-in area, a single room rate for double occupancy and for mainland China only, complimentary breakfast for one each night you stay.
The cost of InterContinental Ambassador membership is USD 200 every 12 months. IHG One Rewards members can also purchase membership for 40,000 points.
The complimentary weekend night is valid on the second night of a minimum two-night paid weekend stay on the Ambassador Complimentary Weekend Night Rate at any InterContinental Hotels & Resorts property worldwide, excluding InterContinental Alliance Resorts.
World of Hyatt and the InterContinental loyalty programs offer guests the ability to collect points or credits toward free nights. By joining, you get selected free benefits.
It’s worth mentioning that these benefits are nowhere near as good as the benefits you get by booking via luxury travel concierge. If you book with our concierge team, you will also get all your usual World of Hyatt or ihg points during your stay.
Our travel agency partnership with Park Hyatt and InterContinental Hotels means you will also get brilliant free benefits, usually including breakfast for two, prioritized room upgrades (subject to availability), hotel credit, and more if you book with one of our team. Our deals are almost always better than booking directly on the hotel website for both brands.
In Paris, New York, and London, you also get free club lounge access when you book an InterContinental hotel via our team.
2. Style
Park Hyatt offers a very high-end finish. In fact, of all the major branded hotel chains (excluding Four Seasons), we think Park Hyatt hotels offer the most luxurious setting.
Take the Park Hyatt Zurich that we reviewed last year. This hotel offers swathes of black marble throughout the double-level foyer. A beautiful lobby lounge with sophisticated clientele with a large fireplace and art spattered around. The rooms are large, with lovely bathrooms that open up to the bedroom, and everything is immaculate.
Our experience with InterContinental hotels is that they often offer a more modern and generic finish, more in tune with the brand than the local area.
The InterContinental in London, for example, is situated in a modern building, perhaps from the 1980s. However, this particular property has the advantage of offering large and windows with fantastic views in the rooms, the fantastic club lounge as well as most of its communal areas. Although this property is no beauty from the outside, the views from this building are quite something.
In Paris, both the Park Hyatt and the InterContinental are situated in beautiful, ornately designed buildings. I particularly like the Parisien rooftop views from the top floor rooms at the InterContinental Le Grand in Paris, but for luxury, pick the Park Hyatt with its creamy stonework, which carries on throughout the communal areas.
The bar and restaurant at the Park Hyatt are incredibly stylish venues with thick Roman-style pillars, and the bar looks out onto the stunning central courtyard. The courtyard and all the communal areas continue with the creamy finish, enabling you to enjoy a quiet coffee in an immaculate setting surrounded by greenery while their live piano player tinkles in the background.
This Park Hyatt is stunning; the rooms are large, and even the peaceful courtyard view rooms offer a peaceful and enviable ambiance from which you can enjoy distant piano playing.
The InterContinental Paris is also a great hotel, but it doesn’t have the boutique feel of the Park Hyatt, and the communal areas, although stunning, do not have the luxury boutique feel of those at the Park Hyatt.
We have also reviewed the Park Hyatt Vienna, which is another stunning refurbished Park Hyatt hotel, this time set in a tasteful conversion of the headquarters of an Austrian Hungarian Monarchy Bank, right in the heart of The Golden Quarter.
This conversion retains many features of the 100-year-old Neo-classical building, including marble staircases polished by the leather of countless bank clerks’ scurrying brogues.
The shape and size of the guest rooms and suites were determined by the layout of the offices and here, there were some very important customers, so the proportions are generous.
3. Location
As a general rule, Park Hyatt and InterContinental hotels are both well located centrally in cities. An exception is the InterContinental Geneva, which is a lovely hotel but is located well out of the tourist area and quite a walk from the lake.
The Park Hyatt Sydney is the best located hotel in Sydney but it comes with an eye watering price tag.
The Park Hyatt Seoul is a much more luxurious hotel than the InterContinental Seoul but it is located in the business center of the city and not in the tourist center. If you are heading to Seoul you might also want to consider the Andaz which we compared with the Park Hyatt Seoul.
4. Size
Park Hyatt hotels tend to be smaller than InterContinental hotels, which can be very large.
5. Rooms
Rooms at Park Hyatt hotels tend to be larger than those at InterContinental hotels. Taking London as an example, the base rooms at the InterContinental London on Park Lane are fairly small. At the newly opened Park Hyatt London, the rooms are more generous.
Another interesting Park Hyatt can be found in New York. This is another new property and is based in one of the skinny new skyscrapers overlooking Central Park.
There is very little communal space at this Park Hyatt, with a very small bar and restaurant, unlike the InterContinental, or The St. Regis, or the Waldorf Astoria, which have much larger communal space. In fact the InterContinental Barclay offers a great communal club lounge too. But the rooms at the Park Hyatt are large and fabulous and make up for the lack of communal space.
The rooms at Park Hyatt, New York, are between 500 and 620 square feet. They are large and stunning. Park Hyatt branded hotels all seem to offer oversized bathrooms, much like Four Seasons hotels.
When compared to the InterContinental New York Barclay, an IHG Hotel in New York, the difference in room size is startling, with Classic Rooms at the InterContinental starting at 250 sq. ft.
If room size is important to you in any city, Park Hyatt hotels almost always have larger rooms and bathrooms.
6. Pool and Gym
Whether there is a pool and gym is very property dependent, but as a general rule, InterContinentals, which have been designed largely as business hotels, do not tend to have pools but usually have gyms, and Park Hyatt hotels often have both.
The Park Hyatt New York has a gorgeous swimming pool, jacuzzi, and sauna on the 25th floor on the opposite side of the building to Central Park.
The Park Hyatt Vienna has a deliciously warm swimming pool situated under the barrel ceiling of the old bank vault.
In Paris, neither the InterContinental nor the Park Hyatt has a pool. In London, the InterContinental does not have a pool, but the Park Hyatt does.
7. Ski
The best Hyatt ski hotels are at Park Hyatt hotels, including Park Hyatt Beaver Creek Resort which is a gorgeous ski hotel.
InterContinental Hotel Group has ski hotels, but they are not part of the InterContinental brand. These include Six Senses Residences Courchevel, Hotel Indigo Silverthorne, Kimpton Taconic Hotel, and several inexpensive hotels around Lake Tahoe.
8. Club Lounge
Most Park Hyatt hotels don’t have a club lounge. InterContinental hotels usually have club lounges. In Paris, New York, and at the InterContinental London Park Lane, you also get free club lounge access at these hotels when you book an InterContinental hotel via our luxury concierge.
9. Family Facilities
Neither Park Hyatt nor InterContinental are desperately family-friendly. If you want the best brand for family-friendly luxury hotels, it is usually Four Seasons or some Belmond properties like the Hotel Cipriani.
10. Price
Since Covid, InterContinental hotels have repositioned themselves slightly because there is less business travel, making them well-priced luxury leisure hotels in most destinations. We have outlined some of the cheapest InterContinental hotels.
Park Hyatt hotels tend to be some of the most expensive hotels in a city, but with a Park Hyatt, you tend to get what you pay for with large rooms, a higher level of luxury, and often very unique surroundings.
Park Hyatt Sydney is usually the most expensive hotel in Sydney and while you can’t argue with its location, right on the waterfront in the rocks, the prices here can be eyewatering.
For a more reasonable Park Hyatt stay, check out our review some of the cheapest Park Hyatt hotels.
11. Conclusion
While both are 5-star, Park Hyatt hotels are almost always more luxurious than InterContinental hotels. But this is taken into account in their higher price tag. If you are happy with a slightly smaller room size and are looking for a club lounge, InterContinental hotels tick most boxes and are also a great choice in most cities.
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