In March, Marriott International opened the first U.S. City Express hotel, several months after it announced it would bring the midscale brand stateside.
A conversion-friendly offering, City Express is a desirable option for franchisees looking to expand during a tight new construction environment, Marriott Global Development Officer for the U.S. and Canada Noah Silverman told Hotel Dive. Additionally, the brand aims to meet growing owner demand for transient midscale products — a category Marriott had not previously played in domestically.
Born in the Caribbean and Latin America region, City Express wasn’t always destined for the U.S. However, as Marriott’s midscale strategy evolved, so did plans for the brand’s expansion.
Now, as the flag charts its U.S. course of growth — with a robust domestic pipeline — Hotel Dive sat down with Silverman to discuss Marriott’s “real opportunity” to capture both traveler and owner attention with City Express, and how loyalty plays into it.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
HOTEL DIVE: Marriott entered the midscale segment when it acquired City Express in 2023. Why did you enter the chain scale at that time, and what has been the strategy around the brand’s growth?
SILVERMAN: Our strategy, more broadly, continues to be to offer customers — regardless of their trip purpose or destination — a product that suits them. Our desire to extend our brand offerings into the midscale tier was driven by the white space that we saw in that tier — a growing customer segment and a real opportunity for us.
As is the case for most of our brand acquisitions or new brand launches, we anticipate that these are going to be global brands. In the case of City Express, explicitly, our intention from the outset was focused on the Caribbean and Latin America. It was a brand that was exclusively distributed across that region, with a heavy presence in Mexico. We saw it as an opportunity to not only extend our presence in that market, but give us a foothold with a new, affordable midscale brand that was going to help fuel future growth in CALA, specifically. But, we always anticipate that these brands may grow beyond their home markets.
Although expanding to the U.S. wasn't part of the original strategy for City Express, certainly it was something in the back of our minds that we thought might be possible. And our midscale strategy, more broadly, was blooming. So, because of its presence in CALA and because we were focused on growing into the affordable midscale space in North America, City Express became a very logical choice for us to do that with.
In June 2024, Marriott announced Project Mid-T, an unnamed conversion-focused transient midscale brand in the U.S. and Canada, that later became City Express. Was that brand always going to be City Express?
Last year, we started focusing on launching a more conversion-friendly midscale brand in the U.S. and Canada. We chose City Express by Marriott as the brand to do that with.
The concept of Project Mid-T is exactly the same concept that we now have with City Express. There are sometimes timing considerations associated with when we want to go to market with our plans to enter into a particular brand space, tier or product type that may be on a slightly different timetable from our choice of brand name. There could be any number of reasons that drive those timing differences, but we knew at the Mid-T launch exactly what we wanted this product to be.
How is traveler demand changing and, in turn, driving Marriott’s push in the midscale segment?
Evolving consumer trends in the world of midscale are different whether we’re talking about City Express or Marriott’s extended stay StudioRes brand. We saw a growing segment of travelers in the midscale extended stay space that was proving to be a valuable and increasingly attractive segment of consumers who we didn't have a product geared toward, and that was part of the motivation of our launch of StudioRes, and we feel good about the long-term trends and dynamics as they relate to the extended stay traveler segment.
It's a little different with respect to City Express. It's primarily a conversion-focused brand in the U.S. and Canada, and we see it as an opportunity to enter into a space that has largely been undifferentiated. Our goal is to have the right hotel and right location for the right customer.
With City Express, we saw an opportunity to not just grow into the midscale space and offer an opportunity for our community of franchisees to grow with us — which we knew they were very interested in — but also to have a product that could be the best in its class in the midscale tier.
We are in an environment in which new construction continues to have challenges. So, offering a broader variety of conversion-friendly brands to our owners is attractive, not just for us as a company that wants and needs to grow, but also for owners of hotels that see an opportunity to take an existing hotel and reaffiliate it with a stronger brand platform and a more desirable customer base.
We have the benefit of being a very large company, and not just in terms of the number of hotels that we have and the number of locations that we're in but also in an incredible customer base, loyalty program, set of sales engines, website and app that help drive bookings. So for an owner, the opportunity to affiliate with a platform as strong as Marriott, in the midscale tier where we did not previously play and with a conversion-friendly product, is seen as very attractive.
How important is loyalty for owners?
Our Bonvoy program has been an extraordinary selling point for us to owners and franchisees for many years and a real competitive advantage for us. The strength of that program and the depth of the customer base is a big part of what fuels owners’ success. As a Marriott owner, knowing the day you open your doors that somewhere between 60% and 70% of your customers are going to immediately come from the Bonvoy platform is a really powerful tool.
It's a powerful tool in generating business at the hotels and returns for the owners of those hotels, and that’s one of the reasons that we continue to invest a lot of time and energy into ensuring the attractiveness of that loyalty program just continues to get better and better.
Can you share a City Express pipeline update?
On a global basis, we have 154 open City Express by Marriott hotels, all but two of which are in CALA. We now have two that are open in the U.S. — one in Duluth, [Georgia], and we just opened our second outside of New Orleans. The pipeline globally is 76 hotels, including 51 in the U.S.
We're expecting some openings in 2025 in markets like Manhattan Beach and Carlsbad, California, as well as at Orange County Airport in Santa Ana, California. Other openings are slated for Orlando, Florida; Charlotte, North Carolina; and the Denver International Airport.
