Moxy Hotels: Marriott's Gen Z Brand Turns 10, Tweaks Strategy

01.10.2024 - 21:39 / skift.com / Sean Oneill

Remember 2014? Pharrell’s “Happy” was inescapable, everyone on social media was dumping ice water on their heads for charity, and Marriott decided it was high time to create its first select-service brand aimed at 20-somethings.

Moxy Hotels was the hotel giant’s effort to be cool. Against the odds, it has succeeded well enough. As it turns 10, the brand now has over 135 properties open. In Europe alone, it plans to open 17 more hotels by 2025.

Moxy’s genesis took years but had an early recipe. Take one part Ikea (the parent company of Ikea had manufacturing ties to the first pre-fab Moxys), add developers wanting to pile as many guests per square foot as possible, choose spaces in gentrifying neighborhoods or districts without hotels affordable enough for Gen Z, and top it off with a heavy pour of “lifestyle” branding.

“We want it to be a bar that just happens to have rooms on top of it,” said Brian Jaymont, senior director and global brand leader.

For decades, the hotel industry operated on a simple premise: the room is everything. Spacious accommodations, plush beds, and in-room amenities were the yardsticks by which hotels measured themselves. Moxy, however, flipped this conventional wisdom on its head.

Moxy’s rooms are compact — averaging just 185 square feet — and stripped of traditional hotel staples like dressers and closets. Instead, guests typically find a strip of pegs along the wall for hanging clothes, a space-saving folding desk, and little else.

It’s a design that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. But it appealed to some millennials accustomed to cramped urban apartments or accustomed to minimalist, Marie Kondo-approved lifestyles.

Hotel investors and owners liked the cost advantages of fitting more rooms into smaller footprints because it made several previously unviable locations feasible for development. From converted office buildings to former banks, Moxy is a brand that lends itself to “adaptive reuse.”

For decades, the lobbies of select-service hotels were mainly decorative. No one spent any time in them. At Moxy, lobbies double as bars, cafes, coworking spaces, and event venues.

Moxy was the first Marriott brand without a formal front desk. Guests instead check in at the bar.

Hotel operators like how Moxy aimed to create bustling social spaces that attract both guests and locals. The reason? Lively lobbies, bars, and cafes drive high-profit food and beverage revenue.

Other brands, such as CitizenM and Yotel also pioneered the small-rooms-big-lobbies concept. But those relied on different aesthetics and price ranges.

When Moxy first debuted, it targeted what Jaymont described as backpackers in their mid-20s looking for a place to crash between adventures.

Today, the