The Rebel (Adopted) Child of Marriott: A "Jam Session" with Michael Levie
Note: Each section title is a distorted echo of a punk anthem. Some are obvious, some are deep cuts. Let’s see who gets them all. Winner gets a beef, paid by yours truly. Promise.Too Drunk to Check-In
There's a story I've told a thousand times, but it still hits like a sucker punch every time I share it. It starts in a lobby, with the cold glow of a self-check-in kiosk, and a man who offered me a beer. But let me rewind. At the venerable age of 46, I've spent over 2,000 nights in hotels. That's more than five and a half years of my life in transient, artificially lit rooms. And in all those stays, I can count exactly one check-in that felt human. One! And, paradoxically, it wasn't even a check-in. It was Paris, years ago. I was poking clumsily at a terminal in a funky little place I'd never heard of before. A guy walked up and said, "I can either check you in, or let you finish, and I'll grab you a beer." If you know me, you already know I chose the beer. We sat down and talked. About music, mostly. And in that moment, something clicked.
That hotel was a citizenM. And that guy, one of the earliest ambassadors of a brand that would go on to redefine what hospitality meant for an entire generation of weary road warriors and tech-savvy rebels. He was the reason I spent more on ancillaries than I ever had in my life. Because it felt personal and real. That beer wasn't just a refreshing beverage. It was an anti-algorithmic act. A refusal of the sterile choreography of modern hospitality, the dead-eyed "Please give me your passport" and the robotic "Have you been here before?" (I have, m*therfucker. Ten times.) And the man behind that ethos, that deliberate dismantling of the traditional check-in ceremony, that punk-rock reinterpretation of service, was Michael Levie.
Last month, at the EHL Innovation Summit, I finally sat down with Michael and, after years of interviews and panels, I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time: nervous. I told him the story. The beer. The conversation. The memory that turned into a mantra I now repeat to my MBA students across Europe. He smiled. Nodded. And then we went deep. Michael talked about technology. About how the industry's legacy systems are fundamentally broken. About the myth of the golden profile. About data that remains locked inside ossified architectures, despite the much-lauded "cloud revolution." "Everybody thought: we go to the cloud, it's resolved. It's not," he said. "The cloud was a step, not the solution." The real shift, he explained, will come with a new architecture. One that displaces the PMS as the monolithic epicenter of hotel operations.
The PMS traps data. It's a cage. What we need is data liquidity. Interoperability. Middleware is the unsung hero. Right now, we have a patchwork of transactional systems that barely talk to each other. RPA can automate tasks, sure, but the real breakthrough is when AI sits on top, interpreting signals. None of that happens until we clean up the backend
. That means going beyond transaction logs. Beyond static CRM fields. Toward microdata, behavioral signatures, tiny pulses of intent. Guest preferences that don't live in someone's memory or in a forgotten spreadsheet, but that flow seamlessly across systems like a melody played in unison. If we want KPIs that matter,
Micheal said, we need to rethink the inputs. Revenue management, marketing, distribution… they all depend on data we don't have, or worse, data we can't trust. That's the real bottleneck.
Then came the pivot from infrastructure to philosophy: when I asked what from citizenM should become an industry standard and what should remain uniquely citizenM-ish, he didn't say design, pricing, or marketing. He said: inclusion. But not the politically correct version. The real kind. Inclusion as in: guests, employees, suppliers, partners. Everyone in the same jam session. Because for Michael, citizenM isn't a brand. It's jazz. There are rails,
he told me. The wagon still needs to ride on something. But inside those rails, there's room to improvise
. The metaphor stuck with me. Jazz, like hospitality, is structure plus soul. It requires discipline, yes. But also trust. You can't fake your way through Coltrane. Or Coleman. Or even John Zorn, if you're into the more dissonant strains, like I am. citizenM works because it's not chaos. It's controlled freedom. The team knows the chart. They've practiced. They've tuned their instruments. But they're allowed to riff. To respond. To feel. That's what makes it real.
And inclusion, he added, doesn't stop at staff or guests. It includes longtime suppliers. Financial partners. Even Marriott. So, of course, I asked the question everyone wants to ask. Now that citizenM is under the Marriott umbrella, how do you keep the rebel DNA alive? Michael didn't flinch. He spoke of Marriott as a family. A large one, sure, but one that respects its weirdest children. Each child is different,
he said. Maybe we're a little bit of a different child. And that's okay. They don't want us to change
, he added. They want us to grow. It's not about rebellion, it's about curiosity. We remain curious. We keep learning. We stay humble. We know we don't have all the answers.
And then, this line, delivered without drama, but with all the weight of lived conviction: Curiosity lets you see the mistakes. Humility lets you admit them. Agility lets you change. That's our formula.
That's where my mind wandered to BrewDog. The hospitality industry is a cemetery of brands that started out rebellious, only to be slowly, inexorably sanded down by the very system they once opposed. This sense of bittersweet betrayal isn't new to me. I felt the same when BrewDog, a brand I once revered, sold a part of its soul. Everything about BrewDog spoke to me: the DIY ethos, the anarchic marketing, the refusal to play by anyone else's rules. Business for Punks by James Watt didn't just inspire me, it rewired the way I think about business. Crowdfunding campaigns built brick by brick by their own fans. Equity for Punks, turning customers into shareholders. Advertising stunts that gave a giant middle finger to corporate orthodoxy: taxidermied squirrels stuffed with bottles of beer, anti-corporate manifestos dropped like bombs in the financial districts they were meant to provoke. It wasn't just beer: it was rebellion in liquid form. And yet, after the (even if partial) sale, the taste changed. Not in the hops or the malt, but in the soul of the thing. Now I can't really drink a Punk IPA without feeling like a bit of a sellout myself… Because in a business like hospitality, obsessed with scaling at all costs, it's rare (and increasingly precious) to see a brand grow without losing its soul.
Will it work? Can you scale a philosophy without killing it? Can a jazz solo survive corporate tempo? I want to believe. Because if you grew up with a music freak like I did, you know the difference between Fugazi and Måneskin. One stood for something. The other… well, you fill in the blanks. The risk with any acquisition is always the same: dilution. The edges get sanded down. The manifesto becomes a tagline. The jam session turns into a PowerPoint. But maybe, just maybe, this time it's different. Because when Michael talks, it doesn't feel like PR. It feels like Miles. Like Monk. Like Jazz. The same conviction that led someone, years ago, to offer me a beer instead of a barcode. The same conviction that built a brand not on buzzwords, but on rhythm.
Michael, if you're reading this: thank you.
For the beer. For the jazz.
For reminding us that hospitality isn't about checking boxes, but about creating moments.
And thank you for staying curious.
Let's see where the music takes us next.
I will be listening…
 EHL Innovation Rewind: Michael Levie on Middleware, Microdata and the Jam Session Spirit of CitizenM | By Simone PuortoTuesday 3 June 2025 |
 Marriott International to Acquire the citizenM BrandMonday 28 April 2025 |
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