Consortium & Soft Brand Coalition & Multi-brand Programme

Preferred Hotels & Resorts

Preferred Hotels & Resorts is a soft-brand consortium for independent luxury hotels, founded in 1968 by 12 North American hoteliers as a referral organisation and headquartered in Newport Beach, California. It owns and operates no properties; instead it sells member hotels sales, marketing, quality assurance and distribution — a single GDS chain code (PH) and the preferredhotels.com booking site — plus brand membership across five collections (Legend, L.V.X., Lifestyle, Connect, Preferred Residences). Its I Prefer Hotel Rewards programme, launched in 2006 and now claiming 6M+ enrolled members, sits on top of member-hotel inventory: guests earn 10 points per dollar of room spend and redeem into cash-value Reward Certificates ($25 to $500) that hotels must accept as payment against room charges. It is a division of family-owned Preferred Travel Group (rebranded from Preferred Hotel Group in January 2023), which also runs Beyond Green, Historic Hotels of America/Worldwide and PTG Consulting.

Visit Preferred Hotels & Resorts ↗

Listed properties: 1
Rooms covered: 0
Countries: 1
Founded: 1968

What Preferred Hotels & Resorts does

One section per category this provider serves. Each links to the category it competes in and lists the properties running it in that specific role.

Demand Networks & Affiliation

Consortium & Soft Brand

Affiliation networks selling independents shared distribution, standards and demand while leaving ownership intact. Chain affiliation often replaces an own loyalty programme — a constraint worth finding early.

Running it here: Matterhorn Group (Zermatt)

Marketing, CRM & Direct Booking

Coalition & Multi-brand Programme

Live programmes where several independent brands share one guest currency. Proof the model works — and a closed club the hotel is admitted to rather than infrastructure it deploys.

No listed property records Preferred Hotels & Resorts in this role yet.

Who it is for

Segment: Independent hotelHotel groupLuxury & boutique
Department: Sales & marketingExecutive & ownership
Persona: General managerOwner & asset manager
Use case: Increase direct bookingsRaise ADR & RevPARGrow repeat stays

Hotels running Preferred Hotels & Resorts

Hotel	Location	Role there	Rooms
Matterhorn Group (Zermatt)	Zermatt, Switzerland	Consortium	—

At a glance

Category: Consortium & Soft Brand
Headquarters: Newport Beach, California, USA
Founded: 1968
Employees: Not company-published; third-party profiles (ZoomInfo, RocketReach) estimate roughly 300-390 staff across nearly 40 global office locations — treat as unverified

Alternatives

Vendors serving the same categories as Preferred Hotels & Resorts.

Global Hotel Alliance (GHA DISCOVERY)
The airline-alliance model applied to hotels: independent upscale and luxury brands keep their own identity but share one technology platform and one guest currency, DISCOVERY Dollars (D$), pegged 1 D$ = 1 USD and redeemable from as little as D$10 against room charges at any member hotel. Members earn on stays and other spend across the whole portfolio, and the alliance settles the cross-brand economics centrally.
Historic Hotels Worldwide
Consortium and marketing programme for historic and heritage hotels, run in association with the US National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Swiss Deluxe Hotels
The association of Switzerland's leading five-star hotels, providing collective marketing, standards and industry representation for its member properties.
Virtuoso
Virtuoso is a by-invitation-only global consortium of luxury travel agencies and their advisors, tracing its roots to Allied Travel (1951), later Allied Percival International / API Travel Consultants, and rebranded Virtuoso in 2000 under Matthew Upchurch. It does not own hotels or sell software to hotels: it aggregates ~20,000 luxury travel advisors and sells them access to a curated preferred-partner portfolio of roughly 2,500 hotels, cruise lines, airlines and tour operators. Member hotels sign a preferred-partner agreement that requires the Virtuoso rate to match the hotel's best flexible publicly available rate and obliges the hotel to fund a fixed amenity stack — daily breakfast for two, room upgrade subject to availability, early check-in/late check-out, and a per-stay property credit of roughly US$100 — on top of the commission paid to the booking advisor. Its revenue comes from member/partner fees and its marketing and event machinery (Virtuoso Travel Week, Virtuoso Life, the annual Luxe Report), not from guest transactions directly.
ASMALLWORLD (ASMALLWORLD AG)
ASMALLWORLD AG is a Zurich-based, SIX-listed (ASWN) private members club and luxury travel ecosystem, founded in 2004 by Erik and Louise Wachtmeister and run on paid subscription tiers; it reported 121,922 members and CHF 19.1m net sales for FY2025. Its commercial core is the ASMALLWORLD Collection, a consortium-style booking platform of roughly 1,800 luxury hotels where paying members book qualifying rates and receive VIP amenities (upgrade, USD 100 hotel credit, breakfast for two, early check-in / late check-out), alongside Bespoke Travel, an events programme and the ASW Horizon card. Since a 2022 strategic partnership and reciprocal equity swap with Global Hotel Alliance — ASW took 10% of GHA, GHA took ~3% of ASW — ASMALLWORLD also holds a mandate to recruit independent hotels into the alliance, marketed as ASMALLWORLD DISCOVERY, which puts member hotels onto GHA's DISCOVERY Dollars currency (D$1 = USD 1, earned at roughly 4-7% of eligible spend by tier, spendable against any part of a bill at 950+ hotels). Group also includes ASMALLWORLD Hospitality (hotel consulting/management), First Class & More, The World's Finest Clubs and Jetbeds.
Belvita Leading Wellnesshotels Südtirol
South Tyrolean consortium of leading wellness hotels — a joint marketing, quality-standard and booking-referral group for spa-led 4★S and 5★ houses in the region.

Running several of these systems at once?

Blue connects an existing hotel stack into one guest profile and one loyalty balance across every property — without replacing the PMS.

Visit Blue