Millennial-focused hotel in Kaunas – countdown begins!

A traditional capsule burying event symbolically marked the start of the construction of millennial-focused Moxy hotel in Kaunas on May 15. This new-concept hotel of the Marriott chain will be the first in the Baltic states and will be opened next year in June.

After the construction Moxy will become one of the largest hotels in Kaunas focused on millennials. A reconstructed 5800 sq. m building on Maironio street located in the territory of the former Sostinė shopping centre will have 175 guest rooms. The hotel will occupy six storeys and have an underground parking lot, it is written in a press release provided by the organisers.

For modern travelers, or millennial

“Nowadays we increasingly tend to arrange our business and personal trips, the private and professional lives. Irrespective of our age and occupation, we spend more and more time travelling and at the same time maintaining the contact with our relatives through various smart devices. Moxy hotels take into account these needs of modern travellers. Here reception is combined with a bar, and spacious common areas allow the guests to relax with friends as well as engage in work activities. We want our guests themselves to decide on the spot when they should relax and when to solve their professional challenges,” Janusz Mitulski, Senior Director of Development in Central and Eastern Europe at Marriott International, has said.

According to him, Kaunas is like Moxy – energetic, dynamic like millennial generation and quickly growing. This place was selected for several reasons – Kaunas’ quick development, improving infrastructure and persisting high interest of foreign investors in the city.

Kaunas is like a millennial

“The fact that a company like Marriott has chosen Kaunas says a lot about our city nowadays. Last year we welcomed a record number of tourists in Kaunas since Independence. During the last few years Kaunas received a record amount of investments. As a result of all this, today Kaunas is the most quickly growing city in Lithuania,” Kaunas Mayor Visvaldas Matijošaitis has said.

“Although Kaunas clearly lacks hotels, we have not seen any new projects here. Therefore, with our partners we decided to invest not where the competition is up and running but where there still is ample room for expansion. It is very pleasant to see Kaunas joining such cities as Frankfurt, London or Berlin where these youthful new-concept Moxy hotels are already operating,” one of the project’s investors Antanas Danys has told.

The project developer Tala LT has invested in the hotel’s construction 15 million euros. The construction work is being carried out by construction company Mitnija, the hotel will be operated by Apex Alliance Hotel Management which operates Marriott and Hilton hotels in Lithuania, Romania and Latvia.

 Marriott introduced the Moxy brand in Italy in 2014. In Kaunas, Moxy will stand out with its unique architectural solutions – it will have curved side walls and the part of the building from the second storey will look like hanging in the air. The hotel design work was carried out by architect studio G. Natkevičius ir partneriai.

The hotel will also have an exceptional interior: the first storey will be predominated by industrial style, it will have special lighting, and the visitors will be greeted by graffiti reflecting various Kaunas elements, painted by Linas Kaziulionis, a well-known street artist in Kaunas. His first work with the motives of the Bison sculpture, the symbol of Kaunas, was presented in the symbolic capsule burying event and will later be placed inside the hotel. Moxy interior was designed by the Rytis Čimkus Studio.

At the end of 2018 there were 30 Moxy hotels worldwide, mostly in the US and Western Europe, 85 more hotels are currently under construction.