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CitizenM

Creating a wellness experience for the mobile citizen, then taking that feeling beyond the room. Connecting in-room rituals with creator storytelling to make citizenM’s playful take on affordable luxury something guests could feel, share and seek out. 


Strategy  Experience  UGC  Performance  







Insight
A city break . City breaks promise a change of pace, yet often arrive with tired feet and an overfilled itinerary. citizenM already had the ingredients for a reset. The opportunity was to turn its room features into meaningful moments of well-being.

We started with how guests wanted to feel: rested after arrival, recharged before heading out, ready to switch off. Simple wellness rituals could make that promise tangible. Built around recognisable travel situations, those same moments could become stories for social, helping new audiences imagine themselves inside the experience long before they reached the booking page.
















Challenge 
Making room for well-being. 
The brief was to build on the room’s existing strengths, giving the bed, shower, lighting and sound a role in helping guests reset. Well-being needed to feel intuitive and unmistakably citizenM: accessible, useful and a little irreverent. Our challenge was to create an experience that worked for the guest and could scale naturally across locations.

The response was citizenMoments: a personalised collection of complimentary wellness rituals accessed through the app. Each used light, sound and the room itself to create a distinct atmosphere, from an energising shower to a slower evening wind-down. Well-being, made part of the stay.















We mapped the emotional rhythm of a stay, from the first exhale after arrival to the last quiet moment before sleep. Field research, rapid prototypes and storyboards turned those needs into tangible experiences. Testing explored which moments guests wanted to try, participate in and share, connecting the value of the experience with its potential to become content.

















Each moment followed a simple structure: a guest need, a recognisable ritual and a distinctive atmosphere. This made the experience repeatable across rooms and gave it a route into social. An arrival became an opening hook; a shower became a reset; a window became a wind-down. Creators could interpret the same emotional starting points through their own humour, habits and perspective.
















Activation
Turning the room into the creative brief.


As an independent creative strategist I connected both projects experience work with a creator programme. I translated the moment library into briefs, pairing guest needs with opening hooks, visual direction and suggested formats. Creators had a specific feeling to bring to life, with enough freedom to make the story their own.

We built and ran the always-on programme across the US and UK, combining guided creator stays with a steady publishing rhythm. The US creative leaned into spontaneity and escapism; London focused on purposeful short stays. Across both markets, creators acted as stylists, storytellers and urban explorers, showing what a stay made possible. A shared creative direction kept the brand recognisable while leaving space for different people, cities and reasons to check in.



















Metrics
Momentum Across Markets  


Across the US and UK, the programme expanded citizenM’s creator presence and generated traffic to site.

The room gave the content something real to communicate: a feeling guests could recognise in their own travels. Research and prototyping established the moments; creator briefs gave them new expressions across markets. The next opportunity is to extend the approach into more European cities and test the strongest creator stories as paid partnership ads, with clear calls to action and booking measurement. The same guest insight can guide the experience, the story and the route to booking. A room to reset becomes a reason to return.




4.2× ROI on the always-on creator programme
3.7M Impressions across the US and the UK
92% Positive sentiment — emotional hospitality reads as hospitality
18.5k Clicks to site, from 32 assets across 5 locations

01  Gen-Z Niche Targeting 

02  Micro-Vlog Campaigns 

03  Product Integrated Storytelling 

04  Problem-Solution UGC Lifestyle













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