Marriott International is planning to open a Moxy hotel at Heathrow in 2015.
The new property, which will be on Bath Road, is part of a huge expansion of Marriott's Moxy brand in Europe, with 150 hotels scheduled for opening in the next decade.
The brand was only announced in March and is being developed in conjunction with Inter Hospitality, which is Ikea's property division.
The first Moxy Hotel is scheduled to open at Milan’s Malpensa airport in 2014. Marriott then has plans to extend the brand across Europe.
Confirmed properties are:
2014
Malpensa, Milan
Munich airport
2015
Berlin Ostbahnhof
Cologne
Heathrow, Bath Road
Oslo
Stratford, Westfield
London Royal Docks
Liverpool
Frankfurt Gateway Gardens
Other locations under consideration are Edinburgh, Brussels, Amsterdam, Malmo, Hamburg, Essen, Heidelberg, Ludwigshafen, Leipzig, York, Inverness, Cardiff and Dublin.
Amy McPherson, Marriott International’s president and managing director of Europe, said: “Generation Y will become 40 per cent of business travellers by 2020. We did research with European travellers — millennial travellers from the UK, Germany, France and places east... to find out what they wanted from hotels.
“Number one, as you'd expect, was having a comfortable bed but number two was for the hotel to be tech savvy and appeal from a design point of view.”
Many of the forthcoming Moxy Hotels will be at airports, as are the new Courtyard by Marriott properties.
McPherson said that both the new Courtyard and Moxy properties will appeal to a new generation of business travellers.
But she added: “Moxy is squarely positioned in the budget category. Moxy has a 17 square metre room compared to 22 sqm [at Courtyard hotels]. And while you have a very nice bathroom it is not to the extent of the Courtyard.
"In addition, Moxy is primarily self-service from a food and beverage point of view.
“Moxy will do very well against its competitive set, we believe, but also bear in mind we didn't have Moxy when we were developing the new Courtyard, but we used the same guiding principles from what we have learned about the generation Y traveller for Moxy."
moxyhotels.com
marriott.com