Millennium Hilton owners manual

On Aug. 30, the luxury hotel known as UN New York will come under the Hilton flag as the Millennium Hilton New York One Plaza. But what does that mean?

Hotel ownership and branding are confusing everywhere, especially in New York City. So with a little help from Hilton, we’ll try to unravel it. Stay with us!

The recently modernized and renovated hotel at First Avenue and East 44th Street is owned, not by publicly traded Hilton, but by a different publicly traded company, Millennium Hotels and Resorts. It’s the seventh property in the city to be managed or franchised under the flag of Hilton Hotels & Resorts, which is Hilton’s flagship brand.

In addition to the Millennium Hilton New York One Plaza, Hilton Hotels & Resorts also manages the Hilton Midtown (on Sixth Avenue) and the Millennium Downtown (on Church Street). Four other city properties under the HH&R brand are franchised.

Hilton also manages or franchises properties around the world under 13 other brands, including Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts (which will manage the Waldorf for 100 years when it reopens after its ongoing renovation by owner Anbang Insurance Group), Conrad, Double Tree and Embassy Suites.

Hilton-branded properties in the city number 43 in all. But Hilton owns none of them. It spun off its owned properties in January 2017 into publicly traded Park Hotels & Resorts, a REIT that owns 67 mostly luxury hotels and resorts in the US and abroad — among them the Hilton on Sixth Avenue.