NOLA Marriott Concludes Year-Long Guest Room Renovation
By Jordan Bradley
The New Orleans Marriott announced on August 4 the completion of a year-long renovation that touched all of the hotel’s 1,333 guest rooms and suites and the M Club lounge.
The renovations updated guest rooms with thoughtful, contemporary finishes that prioritized functionality, hotel representatives said, including bigger beds, new flooring, and updated decor featuring marble vanities and illuminated mirrors.
Renovations also upgraded the New Orleans Marriott’s M Club “to provide Marriott Bonvoy Elite members and qualifying guests with an elevated lounge experience,” featuring a refreshed, neutral color palette, new furnishings, a statement chandelier, and “a modern design aesthetic that supports both productivity and comfort throughout the day,” according to hotel’s renovation announcement.
New Orleans Marriott M Club
The renovation is a sign of continued investment on behalf of the hotel’s owners, Host Hotels & Resorts, officials said.
The New Orleans Marriott is a staple in the city’s meetings and events market. Built in 1972, the lifetime Marriott debuted as the largest building in the city at the time, standing at 42 stories tall. Today, the hotel boasts two towers and more than 85,000 square feet of meeting space.
The latest renovation of the guest rooms at the New Orleans Marriott began on July 14, 2025, and was a methodical process, Scott Jernstrom, Director of Sales and Marketing for the New Orleans Marriott and the neighboring Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, told USAE.
“At any given point in time, we had anywhere between five—and sometimes six—floors of guest rooms out of order” for renovations, Jernstrom said. With an average of 28 guest rooms per floor, contractors began renovations at the top of each of the New Orleans Marriott’s hotel towers and were able to isolate the work between two floors so as to keep guest disturbance to a minimum.
Once the process was started, the team had the first fully renovated guest room completed approximately three and a half weeks later, Jernstrom estimated. As contractors fell into a rhythm with the renovation, and “every week, we would get one new, renovated floor back.”
That attention to detail extends throughout the process, ensuring that guests are minimally impacted, Jernstrom said.
Jernstrom has been with the New Orleans Marriott since 2012, spent around 20 years with Marriott in Washington, D.C., and did a decade stint in commercial real estate, becoming familiar with the process of renovations at hotels that host large meetings and events.
During the renovation process at the hotel, Jernstrom said, a moment with Host Hotels & Resorts Chairman Richard Marriott stood out to him. After three different model rooms were created of the renovations, Marriott stopped by and provided feedback.
“One of the things that struck me that he said was, ‘When you wake up in the morning, how do you know that you’re in New Orleans?’ So [it’s the] little design elements—like the carpet and the wall coverings—that remind you. There’s this gold fleck that looks a little celebratory.”
Guest room renovations at a property like the New Orleans Marriott happen, on average, every eight to 10 years, Jernstrom said. In the case of the New Orleans Marriott, guest room renovations don’t have as significant of an impact on group business as one might expect.
“The 150 guest rooms that are out of order in a 1,300-room hotel—most of those rooms we would be selling those to much shorter term, transient customers, leisure customers, as opposed to groups that are booked years in advance,” Jenstrom said. “Our room block commitments, generally, don’t exceed much more than about 1,000 to 1,100 rooms on a peak night. There could be exceptions to those, but there’s really no displacement or disruption on the group side of the equation.”
Looking forward, Jernstrom said that the New Orleans Marriott team is “looking at pinning down dates” for meeting and event space renovations in the future—“even though it’s really in great condition”—and some refurbishment of the lobby.
“We haven’t firmed anything up yet,” Jernstrom said. “The scope of that is being studied right now by the ownership, and exactly what’s going to be involved there.”
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