Ask Arne Sorenson to rattle off his top priorities as president and CEO of Marriott International, and he’ll immediately point to strengthening the group’s portfolio of 15 hotel brands and adapting products to meet the new demands of the next-generation traveler.

At the intersection of those challenges is Moxy Hotels, Marriott’s recently announced entrant in the economy segment with developer Inter Hospitality Holding B.V., the property division of Inter Ikea Group. The new 3-star brand is designed specifically to target Generation Y and millennial travelers.

Launched last March at the Berlin International Hotel Investment Forum, Moxy will grow to 150 franchised locations in Europe during the next decade, with ground-up development targeted in Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.

Sorenson could not be happier with its progress, he said during a press roundtable at Marriott’s GM conference.

“It’s going great,” he said. The brand’s development committee has approved six projects immediately after its launch, with the first property set to open in Milan during the first quarter of 2014.

He expects a “dozen or so” to open within 12 months of Milan opening its doors, he said.

“It is lightning speed to go from the announcement of a new brand in March and to have the sites,” Sorenson said. “We obviously hadn’t started construction on anything but to actually be open in ’14 will be a great sign.”

Helping in that regard is Moxy’s modular construction. While the rooms are not built in their entirety offsite, as the case with some other hotel modular constructions, Moxy’s rooms comprise five or six separate components that easily can be plugged together. The process is a first for Marriott.

“The speed of construction process is dramatically faster than anything else we build,” he said.

Moxy targets an incredibly underserved market, Sorenson said.

Approximately two million of five million rooms in Europe are in economy hotels. “Of those two million rooms, 99% were situated in a way where it reminds the customer everywhere they turn that they’re in an economy product,” he explained. “In other words: ‘Don’t have fun here. You’re not paying a lot. Therefore, don’t expect a lot.’

“We saw that as a place where we could come in and bring something that was more fun and newer.”

The goal, he said, is to attract the emerging throngs of next-generation travelers who don’t want to sacrifice comfort and design for an affordable price.

“We have been dominant with the boomers for a long time,” Sorenson said. “How do we make sure we translate our strengths and skills in a way that allows us to be dominant with the younger traveler?

“It’s no easy task. And it’s not a task that we will ever look back and say, ‘OK we’re done. We’ve accomplished that.’”

How do you start?

“I think it will be around technology,” Sorenson said. “I think it will be around product design, fundamentally. I think there are advantages that we bring to it. We’ve been in this business of hospitality for 85 years. There’s genuineness to the way Marriott approaches interaction with guests, which is a really genuine welcome, which I think resonates really well with younger travelers.”

Though Generation Y and millennials have been criticized for their lack of interpersonal skills brought on by a reliance on technology, Marriott’s CEO believes there’s still a place for old-fashioned hospitality.

“They’re not running toward an impersonal world in which everything is self service,” he said. “I think they’re running toward a world in which they still can be welcomed and they can still feel like they’re important as people. I think that’s a great advantage we bring to that space.”

That’s not to say Marriott won’t bring technology into that space as well, Sorenson said.

Moxy’s 17-square-meter (183-square-foot) rooms will feature high-tech amenities, such as built-in universal-serial-bus ports and 42-inch flat-screen TVs with airplay connectivity. Each room will also feature a floor-to-ceiling signature art wall that is hand selected to reflect the local city or surroundings.

Public spaces, meanwhile, will double as hip hangouts with food and alcohol, Sorenson said. 

“We (have to) continue to make sure we move our lobbies to a place where we’ve got a food-and-beverage service which is quick but which is good food and which is a full range of booze that’s available and also a use of furniture and sights and sounds that cause people to want to be there.”