Originally Posted by
EuropeanPete
New brand standards giving you the assurance that you always can rely on from Marriott: We will recommend that part of the front is painted something like blue.
...and the interior will be prison-gray with accents of more gray.
For example this lovely room... this is NOT a B&W photo. This is really how bland they've made the room. The only color is the wood on the old light fixture the hotel was too cheap to replace.
Originally Posted by
Horace
The Luxury Collection, Autograph Collection, and Tribute Portfolio are "collection" brands (with The Luxury Collection being the highest tier). These brands are secondary to a hotel or resort property's own name, personality, and reputation. The quality standards are high, and the locations are usually excellent.
Eh.. in my experience, these often are old hotels, sometimes very old, where the Residence Inn down the street provided a better experience. Most of the ones I've seen in the listings have some pretty low ratings. A couple of them were so bad that Marriott wiped out all of the reviews on their site and started over.
The lodging industry has six tiers: Luxury, Upper Upscale, Upscale, Upper Midscale, Midscale, and Economy. See
https://www.hotelappraisers.com/hotel-brands/ for how brands map to these tiers. Fairfield Inn, Moxy, and TownePlace Suites are "Upper Midscale."
<snip>
It's probably a good business move for Marriott. But what a complicated brand structure!
While it may add more keys (rooms) for the Marriott website to sell, and be able to pick up lower-end properties, they do risk damaging their brand with this.
Looking at that link, they claim a Wyndham Garden Inn is on-par with Fairfield and Towneplace, which sounds crazy to me.
After the stay my parents had at the
Wyndham Garden Inn at DTW (despite me insisting they stay at the Westin), they'd never stay at ANY Wyndham property again, nor would/have I. The hotel was so bad, that even with it being provided free by Delta Airlines, some of the passengers chose to sleep in the lobby or head back to the airport because of how disgusting the hotel was. Perhaps other Wyndham Garden Inns are nice and serviceable, but after that experience, it's permanently turned our family off to ALL Wyndham properties since there's no brand standards or Wyndham doesn't enforce them.