One of the benefits American Express Platinum cardholders receive is access to the fine hotels and resorts program (FHR). When booking at one of the 850 participating properties you receive the following benefits:
- Noon check in (when available)
- Room upgrade on check in (when available, some room types are excluded)
- Breakfast for two people
- Guaranteed 4PM late check out
- In room WiFi (not available at all properties)
- Unique property benefit (usually valued at around $100, varies from location to location)
- When booking through FHR you also receive the normal credits towards elite status, hotel loyalty points and your elite status is also recognized (this isn’t the case with most hotel booking websites like Kaligo, PointsHound, Rocketmiles, Agoda or Booking.com)
In the past the FHR website was difficult to navigate and you needed to log in to see a lot of the information. The site also used flash which meant it was painfully slow and didn’t load on all devices. Now you can see a lot more information without logging in, for example you’ll see what the unique property benefit is and also if there are any special offers (e.g fourth night free). You’ll still need to log in to view rates unfortunately.
There are still a lot of issues with the website, it’ll only show three properties in the search bar unless you look at the full results for that location for example. Hopefully American Express continue to make improvements to this website and also make the rates publicly viewable. It’s always difficult to determine how valuable a benefit is before you have a card when this type of information is not made available publicly.
As always, make sure you compare the rates compared to booking directly or through another third party website. The benefits FHR give you are great, but it’s often more expensive than booking direct. Let me know your thoughts about the new website in the comments below.
Hat tip to Satforlegroom on Flyertalk
You spelled “improvements” wrong.
Thanks, fixed.