What Is Next for Hotels and Hospitality Spaces? 

0:00Aliya Khan:At ThinkLab, we believe that research should do more than just spark ideas. It should create meaningful change. So for every survey completed, we plant a tree. That means that your insights don't just shape the future of the built environment, they help reforest it. It's quick, it's meaningful, and it starts with your voice. Simply click the link in the show notes to get involved in our latest research and grow something bigger than data. Let's design a better future together.

0:35Aliya Khan:What if hotel guests no longer expected luxury, but demanded adaptability? Today, we explore how Marriott is reimagining hospitality for a world where the line between home, work, and travel has officially blurred. Welcome to Design Nerds Anonymous, the podcast that sparks curiosity at the intersection of business and design. I'm your host, Amanda Schneider, founder and president at ThinkLab and speaker now featured on TED.com. In this episode, we're exploring how hospitality is being redefined in an era of rapid change and what that means for the spaces we build and the moments we remember. Joining us today are two visionaries helping to shape that future at one of the most influential brands on the planet.

1:30Aliya Khan:Marriott International, a company that, get this, they open up a new hotel roughly every 20 hours. Today, I'm joined by Alia Khan, VP of Global Design Strategy and Product Development. She leads the design direction for over 30 Marriott brands, helping to reimagine what it means to create spaces that feel personal, flexible, and deeply human. Joining her is Jason Robertson. He's the VP of product management and the force behind Marriott Labs, the company's innovation hub. With a quirky background that we love here on DNA in both physics and design, design nerd all the way, Jason is leading the charge on everything from robotic furniture to energy innovation, ensuring that Marriott doesn't just keep up with change, but shapes it.

2:23Aliya Khan:Together, they explore how hospitality is being reimagined through smart systems, adaptable space, and immersive design. And why the most radical shift may be creating space for pause in a world that never stops. So to set the tone, we asked each of them to introduce themselves and sum up the future in one word. Here's Jason. My name is Jason Robertson. I am responsible for a few things here at Marriott. One of them is all the technology that our global design team uses to help our owners and franchisees build on strategy really great properties all around the world. The second is I'm responsible for our labs program where we partner with other big companies to bring new products and solutions to market that make the whole industry better.

3:10Aliya Khan:And I see the world getting more bifurcated. And what I mean by that is it is getting easier and easier to make things in the digital world and harder and harder to make things in the physical world. And I do not yet know how we're going to reconcile those differences.

3:28Jason Robertson:That's a good one. My name is Alia Khan and I lead design strategy for our full service through to mid-scale brands. What does that mean? I want you to think about our hotels like a meal. What our team does is we pull the ingredients, we write the recipes that then we hand over to our partners who are actually building the hotels. So they are partnering with the design firms and the owners and the architects to construct them. We are behind the scenes, working with ingredients to write those recipes, which is very fun. We have the very fun job of dreaming and taking things that are out there in the future and pulling them into what could be for the present and making them a thing.

4:25Jason Robertson:I'm now on to like what the future holds. It's interesting because travel was such an enigma once upon a time, and now people are able to do it with such relative ease, that to me, I almost see it as a challenge now. How do we continue to keep it exciting and fresh so that people don't treat it with a level of blasé and just continue to aspire and want to do more? But more than that, I think push farther into places that are not expected. It's very easy to go to London, Paris, Barcelona, but how do you push that excitement of going farther and going to different places and not being blasé about travel because it's just so much easier.

5:12Jason Robertson:And if you had to pick one word to describe the future, what would that be? I still find it exciting. And it's exciting in an unknown way.

5:24Aliya Khan:I think that ties really well into your response because one of our previous guests in this season was talking about the movie Ready Player One. And I think we have to be careful that the world isn't better in the virtual world than it is the physical world. So perhaps this is a reason to really focus on how we can create these exciting experiences that people want to leave their house, leave their city for. As part of that, as the virtual world gets more and more built up, one of the side effects of that is real physical experiences are going to become incredibly special. The value of these moments that you have in real life are going to become these magical things that become rarer and more precious and more sought after.

6:12Aliya Khan:This tension is going to exist where we can all travel really easily, but having these special moments.

6:22Aliya Khan:We're just getting started. A quick pause for this short break, and we'll be right back. We challenged the status quo. We went looking for new and inspiring ideas beyond our Pinterest feeds, connecting the dots between how a future was unfolding and how we should be designing for it. I'm Kaylin Reed, Applied Insight Strategist, Certified Futurist, and host of Alternative Design Podcast. We started Alternative Design as a beacon of hope for our industry, at a time when the world was no longer business as usual. At Kimball International, the future isn't something that we wait for. We search for it, spotting the signals that reveal where the human experience is headed, both inside and far beyond the design industry.

7:08Aliya Khan:Alternative design is where those signals turn into ideas, where we connect what's happening in the world to what it means for the way that we design spaces and the furniture that shapes them. Because when we design with intention, we're not just making furniture. We're making a better future. If you're a fan of Design Nerds Anonymous, you will love alternative design. You can find us wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to subscribe to help us design what's next.

7:42Aliya Khan:All right, let's get back into it.

7:48Jason Robertson:I also think there's something really beautiful about regrounding in the basics, where sometimes we're so intent and we're all guilty of this, designers particularly, we're so focused on, I have to do all of these things at the same time. But sometimes all someone wants to be able to do is have the most incredible night's sleep, but wake up in this way that they feel well rested, but they also wake up knowing exactly where they are. And how do you bring it full circle back to the core values of what comfort on the road might be? What travel should be able to offer you? And what are things that maybe somewhere along the way when you're traveling that much, you kind of feel like, oh, it's fine.

8:38Jason Robertson:It's OK. I don't need this when I'm on the road. But you shouldn't have to give up. And how do you almost bring the loop back to reclaiming the basics while still being able to feed that wanderlust and that curiosity and the new. And this probably goes into the scope of what you

8:58Aliya Khan:all do on a daily basis. And Jason, in our pre-call, you shared some stats about how many hotels you're building, how many you're renovating. Can you share those for our listeners? Yeah, for sure. It's probably worth talking about just the scale of Marriott to begin with. So So today we have over 9 ,300 properties open around the world. That's north of 1.5 million rooms around the world. We just bought a brand called Citizen M, which added a whole bunch more rooms and diversified our portfolio brands. We have approximately 230 million Bonvoy members all around the world that are actively engaged with our loyalty program.

9:38Aliya Khan:Me too. I'm one. Yay. Thank you for your loyalty. And so we just have enormous scale. And the thing that is perhaps amazing or impressive beyond that is that we still open a hotel approximately every day. Last year we opened, I think I saw the number, 123 ,000 new rooms in our portfolio in 2024. We also have been around a long time and we have a lot of renovations going on too. And so of the 9 ,300 properties around the world, we do something like 1 ,000 renovations a year. And that could be on a subset of rooms. It could be on a public space that varies pretty, pretty wildly, but we have a lot, a lot, a lot of design and construction going on all the time.

10:22Aliya Khan:That's amazing. Just the sheer scale of that, I think is mind blowing. One of the things I think you mentioned is that you're building a new hotel every 18 to 36 hours. Is that accurate? Yeah. Yeah. Technically 20 hours. Isn't that wild? That's mind blowing. But given that you have a vested interest in really understanding this balance of what Jason talked about in his intro of how to help the real world maybe stay connected to the pace of change in this digital world. So I would love to hear surprising or revealing research that you're following that might relate to what's next for hotels and hospitality spaces.

10:58Jason Robertson:Let's take this hybrid traveler, this hybrid work phenomenon. These people who are now actually employed by a company that is in another country, therefore they're able to live wherever or work wherever and they no longer have apartments and they go from long stay hotel to long stay hotel. And in the course of doing that, they also now have different expectations out of their hotel rooms. Sometimes they're traveling with their partners. Now two people need to be able to operate out of a hotel room. That age old 10 foot long desk under a television, which everybody used to sit at is no longer workable.

11:39Jason Robertson:Two people can't sit at it. Two people can't order, eat at it. Also, who wants to stare at a wall and stare at a television? What are we doing to reconfigure our rooms? But then secondarily, there's also the thing of if you're now in this room all the time, what is your sleep setting look like? What is your rest moment look like? And what is your socialization moment look like? And what is your work setting look like? And are you really going to call housekeeping every time you want to go from one mode to the other? And so we go through this process of understanding that this is a consumer need.

12:16Jason Robertson:And then Jason explored a partnership with a company that actually has developed this ingenious product that allowed us to play around with. We're not breaking walls, We're not moving plumbing lines. We're not blowing holes in ceilings. So that partnership with this company called Ori Living was an opportunity for us to thread the needle where we took these insights, understanding who this traveler is to offer this solution where now we've packaged this up. And for us to be able to take prototypical select service brands and use the intelligence of consistent prototyping to solve problems, that's the fun.

13:01Jason Robertson:That's the magic. That's where actually being able to take a recipe and refine and be able to say, not only can you solve problems, you can solve it efficiently and at a real price point. That's when it clicks.

13:16Aliya Khan:I'll jump in there and tell a little bit more about working with Ori, too. So Ori, they make robotic furniture or dynamic rooms. And one of the things that called our attention to this and got us really interested was this bed that drops down from the ceiling. So underneath it is a sofa or a desk, and then the bed can lift up or drop down. And suddenly you can change this room pretty dramatically from an office to a bedroom or from one bed to a two bedroom and make it really, really shift to match the needs at any given moment. When we did some research around this early with our customers a few years ago, we saw 67 % of people were really interested in this kind of flexibility.

13:57Aliya Khan:This is coming right out of COVID at a time. So people were confined to spaces and even when they were traveling, they needed to use that space multiple ways. We're seeing that kind of need persist coming out of COVID and the pandemic. And people still want these really flexible and dynamic spaces to help them achieve whatever they want to achieve in real time. I just want to clarify, so the bed actually goes up into the ceiling and then comes back down to truly rearrange the space. And then follow up question to that, because I work out of hotel rooms all the time. They weren't designed at a time when we were all working remotely and you need to have lighting with the window.

14:37Aliya Khan:So does this allow you to reframe some of those settings in a way that's a bit more advantageous?

14:45Jason Robertson:That is one of the many ways. There's also so many other things that we've started to put out there, and some of them are even more low tech. Like I have a pet peeve. It's a very simple thing. I don't like to do Zoom calls with my unmade bed behind me. But now in a simple hotel room, I can offer desk configurations so that I can control how I place my laptop. Or you're traveling with a friend. One person wants to watch TV. One person wants to take a nap. How do you now both coexist in the same hotel room? What are those options around design? Is it screens? Is it Is it theater drapes? What does that look like?

15:26Jason Robertson:Not all of it is high impact, high technology, but a lot of it is driven from just human need. Like how many times have you sat on the edge of a tub and done a Zoom call because someone in the room is sleeping or I don't have children, but I have many coworkers who have children and they're like, oh, the kids go to bed and now everyone's sitting in the hotel room in the dark, whispering, drinking their Chardonnay because the kids have gone to bed and you can't leave the room. And I just feel like as designers and problem solvers, there are so many things that we have now been able to do to help solve for that.

16:02Aliya Khan:If I could go a slightly different direction, too, there's another big macro thing that's been happening for maybe a decade now, which is people are less interested in stuff and more interested in experiences. Yeah, fully. In pandemic times, the sense that people were investing in their houses to make them nicer to be around and things like that. But we're seeing this return with a vengeance and people are really interested in having these experiences or owning less stuff. And some things that point to that, I mean, here's something close to 70 % of people are actively looking to buy and own less stuff as just part of their lifestyle.

16:38Aliya Khan:So Mary entered the outdoors with some recent acquisitions and some recent launches. and we are thinking deeply about how people travel for different reasons all over the place. So being outdoors, having experiences, going to entertainment venues, like we have the Aeros tour, the tour of Beyonce happening now, and we're investing in these deeply experiential reasons for travel. And one thing that points to that is the outdoor category is growing two and a half times as fast as the rest of the travel industry. So people are craving this connection to nature and just being outside and the general, I can't get it anywhere else.

17:23Aliya Khan:Buying something doesn't satisfy this need of being out in a place or going to a concert, traveling to Dublin to see Taylor Swift. These are moments that people are choosing to travel for because they are this one-of-a-kind experience that I can have. We'll be right back after this short break.

17:50Aliya Khan:You cannot separate the human experience from all of the lived experiences that take place inside spaces.

17:59Jason Robertson:You simply can't. When the planet thrives, we thrive. And when we're making informed and smart choices that are future-focused and human-centric, we're doing good things for humanity and for the planet.

18:14Aliya Khan:I love supporting the DNA podcast because it is literally right on the leading edge of understanding the future and being curious about where this industry is headed, but also where humanity is headed.

18:29Jason Robertson:That's a driving thought process for Mannington as well. Mannington Commercial is a curious organization.

18:36Aliya Khan:We seek to understand. This is Cindy Kaufman. I'm Vice President of Marketing with Mannington Commercial, and we are a very proud sponsor of the DNA Podcast.

18:45Jason Robertson:We would love to connect with you, and if you don't know who your rep is, we hope you'll come find that person on ManningtonCommercial.com.

18:56Aliya Khan:Thanks for sticking with us. Now, let's return to the ideas shaping the future. That's amazing. When I think of outdoors, I think of when people are working together so much more frequently over Zoom. When they do get together, they really want to be together in different ways. How is that trend shifting or shaping how you guys think about space?

19:17Jason Robertson:Element Hotels is one of our brands that actually started to go there where we created what's known as this thing called Studio Commons. And the idea was, why do people go to Airbnb? be. This idea that you're not in a hotel, you're kind of at home, you have this living room that you can hang out in, you can cook dinner together, you're home away from home. And so what Element did was in every hotel, there are four or five rooms, they gang together, and you have access to a living room, a dining room and a kitchen. And the thinking was you're away as a team, and you want to have this separate space that isn't part of the lobby experience.

20:00Jason Robertson:In COVID, we know that families that were reuniting after months loved it. Sports teams love it. Friends weekends love it. But it's exactly that sentiment of it's a human need. You want to get together. You want to hang out on this oversized sofa and watch TV and, I don't know, pop popcorn or maybe get up in the morning and cook breakfast together. But there are just those certain things that you are not able to do as seamlessly in a hotel room. And this was our opportunity to play in that space. Fast forward now, of course, we have apartments by Marriott, which is fully vetted, furnished, soft branded, full service apartments, which is a different type of product.

20:47Jason Robertson:So we are much more in that apartment and residential space. I said, Jason, when you were speaking earlier, outdoor is really an opportunity to rethink, you know, how are we welcoming people? And what does that look like? Perhaps the priority historically would have been very different. And that's, I think, the fun of it, right? There's something in there, too, about just making the outdoors accessible to more people. Yes.