With almost 8,500 hotels around the world, Hilton is getting into cruises

The hotel industry is coming down with a serious case of cabin fever, as Hilton Worldwide becomes the latest lodgings chain to announce a cruise offering, following the likes of Marriott and Four Seasons, per Bloomberg reporting.

Customers — presumably many of them Poirot fans — will be able to pick from 29 suites across five decks when booking on the Waldorf Astoria Nile River Experience, a Hilton press release says. The company told Bloomberg that the new experience was less about keeping up with the competition as much as revisiting its Egyptian “floating hotel” concept from the 1960s, while their head of luxury brands also outlined that it’s not part of a move into the cruise business more broadly.

Given how quickly Hilton’s land-based expansion has ticked up in recent years, that probably makes sense.

While the company itself was founded by Conrad N. Hilton in 1919, the first hotel to bear the now iconic “Hilton” name wasn’t opened until six years later.

Now, a full century on, the business is still finding ways to grow its vast portfolio, which includes properties like Hilton Garden Inns and Hampton, its mid-range chain that has boomed to become the world’s largest lodging brand.

Embracing a more acquisitive path to growth, the brand’s overall location tally (including owned and leased properties, franchises, and hotels that the parent company manages) hit 8,447 at the end of 2024 — more than double the tally from 2013, when Hilton Worldwide went public in the biggest hotel IPO in history. Those hotels house almost 1.27 million rooms and welcomed over 220 million guests last year.

In a sign that the water might be getting pretty warm in the cruise industry, Carnival, the biggest cruise operator in the world, jumped more than 8% this morning after posting record results for the second quarter and raising its outlook for the year.