How Marriott Adds Boutiques With its Design Hotels’ Brand

Stratis Batayas, a first-time hotel owner in Greece, is better at inventing creative concepts for guests than knowing the latest techniques in global hotel marketing and distribution.

That’s why when he opened the luxury hotel, Manna, a restored manor house in the mountains 2 hours from Athens, he joined Design Hotels. It’s a brand owned by Marriott that offers networking events and consulting services, and about 60% of the 300 participating owners are running hotels for the first time.

Stijn Oyen, who became the managing director of Marriott’s Design Hotels brand in January, spoke with Skift in an exclusive interview.

Design Hotels’ Growth Spurt

Design Hotels — founded a few decades ago in Europe — is gaining momentum in North America. This year, it added 10 new U.S. hotels, and it now has more than 25 in Mexico.

Recent additions include Firmdale’s 69-room The Warren Street Hotel in New York City and properties from Drift Hotels in locations from Santa Barbara to Nashville.

This year, the brand created a position — a global director of brand and community — to help foster connections among its “Originals,” the brand’s term for its visionary hotel owners.

New “Studio” Helps With Marketing

Last month, Design Hotels added “The Studio,” an in-house creative agency. Consultants visit a property, hear from the hoteliers about the hotel’s story, and then suggest the hotel’s website’s look, a rebranding, or a digital marketing campaign. A handful of European properties are the first to try The Studio.

The brand has a global sales team that helps hotels land bookings from leading travel management companies and corporate clients. It ran 49 events this year. Oyen plans to boost that by 30% next year.

Design Hotels also offers tailored pricing, distribution, and publicity strategies, including the design of PR campaigns. Oyen sees potential in working with “like-minded lifestyle” brands in marketing collaborations and, partly to that end, has created a new position, global director of partnerships.

Loyalty Push

Oyen has a side job of trying to persuade hoteliers to make their properties bookable through the loyalty program, as Marriott aims to offer its Marriott Bonvoy members non-generic properties to book.

Only a little over half of the hotels have joined Marriott Bonvoy, but that’s up from a third at the end of last year — and merely four hotels in 2018.

Oyen has succeeded because he has street cred among boutique hoteliers. He has been a general manager at the W Barcelona and for luxury Marriott properties in Mallorca.

Yet a couple of hoteliers have told Skift that they are still reluctant to join Marriott Bonvoy. They worry that associating with a major hotel group could detract from the boutique image.

Yet Oyen believes he’ll gain traction because independent hoteliers face increasingly steep competition. Nearly 60,000 branded lifestyle and soft-branded boutique hotels are proposed to open between mid-2023 and 2027, according to an analysis by The Highland Group of CoStar’s STR

Oyen also wants Design Hotels hoteliers to help create Marriott Bonvoy Moments experiences. The idea is to enable hoteliers to offer “experiences that money really cannot buy.”

Examples might include a bespoke leather jacket-making experience in Nashville coupled with a private concert in a top suite of the member hotel — the kind of distinctive programming that underscores what member hotels try to provide to guests.

Looking Ahead

Oyen’s ambition for Design Hotels is to maintain selective growth, emphasizing quality over quantity.

“It’s as much about the visionary behind it as it is about forward-thinking design,” Oyen said, discussing what makes a property worthy of the Design Hotels portfolio.

The brand’s average property has 60 to 70 rooms. “But the size is less important than the owner’s vision and execution,” Oyen said.

The managing director wants to expand Design Hotels beyond its 60-country footprint — especially by strengthening its presence in the Americas, Asia Pacific, and Greater China, where he’s adding dedicated resources.

“We’re in a very sweet spot,” Oyen said. “Design Hotels was out there first with this purpose-led experimental hospitality decades ago. After Covid, we’ve seen an acceleration in demand from travelers looking to connect with local culture and have memorable experiences. It’s a shift from material luxury to seeking a more profound experience that enriches you.”

Sean O'Neill, Skift