We own both Hilton and Marriott. Each has it's strength's and weaknesses.
Hilton's reservation stytem is extremely flexible with points based reservations. You purchase a week but each week is assigned a points value. A 2 bedroom Platinum season is 7,000 points, a two bedroom gold season is 5,000 points, a one bedroom platinum season is 4,800 points and so on. The points can be spent on reservations. You may reserve as few as (I think) 2 nights up to 7 nights or longer depending on how many points you own and what season you're staying in (Plat. season staying in silver season could be longer than a week's stay). These points can also be used to purchase nights at Hilton hotels, Cruises, RV rentals and exchanges through RCI.
On the down side, Hilton doesn't build many of it's own resorts. It has a lot of affiliate resorts that those owners must pay an addtional fee to get into the Hilton system (as I understand it at least). So while a resort might be listed, all the units in that resort may not be available the HGVC members. Hilton is also somewhat limited in it's foriegn affiliates. Ireland (new), Scotland and Mexico are the only foriegn affiliates that come to mind right now.
Hilton tends to continue to overdevelope certain area's where sales are very strong. Las Vegas, Orlando and Hawaii are the main area's of building new Hilton built resorts.
Marriott has a weeks based exchange system that tends to be less flexible. For internal exchanges you go through the Marriott desk at Interval International. It's a week for week exchange system with internal exchanges costing you $89 rather than the regular exchange fee from I.I. ($129?)
While it's true you can lock off most Marriott's (but not all), it is still a week for week exchange.
Marriott is more limited in usage as you can only split weeks in two, not individual days. You can split a week and stay 4 week nights one time and then 3 weekend nights at a later date. Of course there is a charge to do this.
You many lock of many (but not all) Marriott units and stay one week in one half (master suite) and another week in the lock-off unit (studio unit) to get two weeks vacation. Of course, you can utilize Hilton points to do something similar as well.
Marriott's advantage is the locations they have and that nearly all are Marriott built properties. Marriott set's a very high standard for their resorts and you can almost bet any Marriott resort you stay in will be one of the top resorts in that area. They have far more locations that Hilton and at the rate Marriott is building, Hilton will never be able to catch up.
Both Hilton and Marriott trade extremely well within there respective exchange companies. Both exercise right of first refusal on resales keeping resale prices higher than most timeshares. Both are some of the highest quality resorts in any area.
As pointed out Marriott's MF's are higher than Hiltons for most, but not all properties. There are some Marriott's that are bargains as far as MF's are concerned.
Both Marriott and Hilton allow you to exchange your timeshare points for their respective hotel award points program. With Hilton you automatically become a Silver Elite member in the HHonors program. With Marriott you do not. With Marriott, if you have the Chase Marriott Rewards credit card you become a Silver member of the Marriott Rewards program.
With that in mind, we own two Marriott's and one Hilton. We own the Marriott's because we enjoy their resorts more than the Hilton's and there are more choices in the Marriott resort family. We also feel their resorts are just a little nicer (but not by much). If you were to purchase either I don't feel you could go wrong. It just depends on which system fits your personal needs the most.
