Marriott International's newest collection brand made its American debut late last year in about as unglamorous a fashion as a hotel launch can manage: two boutique properties in Miami Beach and Santa Monica quietly swapped their signage and started welcoming Bonvoy members. No ribbon-cutting spectacle, no splashy ad campaign. Just FOUND Miami Beach opening under the Series by Marriott flag on November 10, and FOUND Santa Monica following three days later on November 13.
The brand itself isn't new globally — Marriott introduced Series by Marriott in May 2025, initially through a deal in India, positioning it as a way to bring "strong, regionally relevant brands and hotels into the Marriott portfolio" without forcing independent operators to give up what made them distinctive in the first place. The US expansion is the brand's first real test in Marriott's home market, and it's arriving through a partnership with Hawkins Way Capital, a Los Angeles-based hospitality investment firm that owns the FOUND Hotels boutique brand through its FCL Management affiliate.
The deal, first announced in September 2025 according to a joint release from Marriott and Hawkins Way, covers five properties in total: Miami, Santa Monica, San Francisco, Chicago and San Diego. Two are open as of this writing. A third, the Best Western Plus Pepper Tree Inn in Santa Barbara, has already been converted into FOUND Hotels Santa Barbara, Series by Marriott, suggesting the pipeline is moving in stages rather than all at once.
Ross Walker, managing partner at Hawkins Way Capital, described the arrangement as a way to plug into Marriott's infrastructure without losing what makes the FOUND properties distinct. "Our collaboration with Marriott is an exciting catalyst for Hawkins Way Capital and its FCL Management affiliate as we bolster our hospitality platform nationwide," Walker said when the five-property agreement was first announced.
That balancing act — keeping local character while gaining big-brand scale — is really the whole premise behind Series by Marriott. Properties that join the brand keep their existing name and what Marriott calls their "localized personality," essentially operating as a soft-branded collection rather than being remade into a generic Marriott product. What changes is the back end: Bonvoy loyalty integration, access to Marriott's global sales and distribution network, and inclusion in Marriott's broader marketing engine. For a traveler booking FOUND Santa Monica, the experience at the property may look almost identical to before. But that stay now earns and can be booked with Bonvoy points, and it shows up in Marriott's app and website search results alongside the company's other 30-plus brands.
For Hawkins Way, a firm that has built a reputation for turning around boutique and independent hotels, the appeal of a Marriott flag is straightforward: distribution. Independent and small-collection hotels can struggle to compete for visibility against companies that spend billions annually on loyalty programs and global sales teams. Joining Series by Marriott doesn't require Hawkins Way to abandon the boutique identity it built with FOUND — it just adds Marriott's reservation system and rewards program on top of it.
Series joins a growing list of "soft brand" collections that major chains have built for exactly this purpose — Marriott already runs Autograph Collection, Tribute Portfolio and Design Hotels under a similar model, while Hilton has Curio Collection and Tapestry Collection, and Hyatt has its own array of unbranded partnerships. What differentiates Series, according to Marriott's own positioning, is a sharper focus on hotels with strong regional identity rather than purely upscale independent boutiques. The brand's first deal in India and now its US launch through Hawkins Way both fit that description: properties that had real local recognition before Marriott ever entered the picture.
The conversion of the Best Western Plus Pepper Tree Inn into a FOUND-branded, Series by Marriott property is worth noting on its own. Best Western has spent recent years trying to push upmarket with acquisitions like WorldHotels and Sadot-adjacent soft brands, and losing a property to a Marriott collection brand is the kind of flag conversion that shows just how competitive the mid-and-upper segments of the US hotel market have become. Independent owners increasingly have their pick of major loyalty ecosystems to plug into, and that competition is pushing all the big players — Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, Wyndham and Choice — to build or expand soft-brand collections that can absorb existing properties without a full renovation or rebuild.
What happens over the next year will say a lot about how serious Marriott is about growing Series domestically. Two of five signed properties are open; three more are still in the pipeline, including markets — San Francisco, Chicago, San Diego — that would give the brand real coast-to-coast visibility rather than a coastal-boutique niche. If Marriott and Hawkins Way close out that pipeline on schedule, Series by Marriott could become a template other regional operators look to when they're deciding whether to stay independent or trade some autonomy for the reach that comes with a global loyalty program.
For now, the story is a modest one: two hotels, two cities, and a brand still finding its footing in the US. But modest launches have a way of becoming case studies. Marriott has built entire brand families — Autograph Collection now numbers in the hundreds of properties worldwide — out of exactly this kind of slow, deal-by-deal start. Whether Series follows that trajectory will depend less on any single opening and more on whether independent owners like Hawkins Way keep deciding that a Marriott flag is worth more to them than staying fully on their own.
