Marriott chain directing focus on millennials
By Alexandra Wolfe, Wall Street Journal
Bill Marriott, the 82-year-old chairman of Marriott International, the $19 billion hotel-management company, is done with flowered drapes and white tablecloths. In place of fusty bedspreads and fluffy carpets, he wants most of his 200 new luxury and lifestyle hotel projects to be filled with sleek flat-screen TVs, hardwood floors and hopping bars.
“We’ve got to be cool!” Marriott exclaims, sitting in one of the last bastions of the old Marriott aesthetic —- his office. Surrounded by oil paintings, old photographs and a model boat, his sprawling suite in his company’s headquarters in Bethesda, Md., is exactly what the future of Marriott hotels will not look like. It will look instead like the hotel company’s innovation lab a few floors below, where mock rooms are being built in a cavernous space to be tested among 20-somethings.
Later this summer, Marriott will launch its new hotel chain, Moxy Hotels, aimed at the millennial generation (roughly ages 18 to 33). In partnership with Inter Hospitality Holding, the hotels will feature small, low-cost rooms with grab-and-go food and the feel of a Silicon Valley startup.
“In four years, 60 percent of our business will be millennials,” says Marriott, who adds with a laugh, “All of us old folks are moving on.”
The future of Marriott Hotels will look like the hotel company’s innovation lab, where mock rooms are being built in a cavernous space to be tested among twentsomethings.
Unlike Uncle Bill who is nine years my senior, I had no idea what on earth a millennial is until I read this article. Having read it, I’m not sure why I should care.
But if good ol’ Bill can build and maintain Marriott rooms where I don’t track dirt from the carpet into the shower, he’ll be a real innovator in the lodging industry.
I am anxious, though, to know what a “hopping bar” is. If it’s an in-room bar where I can get a Bud Light for less than 10 bucks, the man’s clearly an innovator.
I wonder if Bill lobbies against Air BnB. Millenials trust that new economy more than large corporations.
Copper, A “hopping bar” is a place where you have a few drinks, then you hop around the room like a rabbit. Arms out front and legs together, you know just like the cottontails in my garden! C’mon everyone, lets all do the the bunny hop!
If Marriot’s pulls this off trying to attract “the millenials”, and us “old folks are moving on”, well so be it. We’ve already got a strip club at stateline and a revolving line of folks for the tatttoo joints in town so why not another casino dedicated to young folks drinking too much and vomiting in the street and crashinhg their cars? What could possibly go wrong?
We already have the young party crowd and have for many years, even going back to my younger years in the family motel business in the early 60’s.
I would personally like to see more focus put on our visitors placed on a different clientele, perhaps with a higher priority placed on another group of folks rather than just on the young crowd, we got them already, thats a done deal!
Number one! Attracting more youth activites along with more attractions for
Family’s and Seniors and higher end customers, that come to the lake for the beauty and recreation, rather than the “party till you puke” young crowd!
Now, damnit you hooded sweat shirted hoodlums get out of my yard! (heh, heh!), no seriously , come to So. Shore and have a good time! Lets just expand our reach to folks that come here to enjoy and not destroy!.
Old Long Skiis