citizenM Amsterdam Amstel Review: I Get It Now

I recently wrote about the exercise of finding somewhere to use three Marriott 35,000-point Free Night Certificates that were approaching expiry. The result was an equally unusual three-night Amsterdam itinerary: one night at citizenM Amsterdam Amstel, followed by two nights at Element Amsterdam.

On the numbers alone, citizenM wasn’t the obvious winner. Our Thursday night cost a 35k FNC plus 17,000 Bonvoy points, and in my earlier analysis I calculated that the certificate itself was extracting only about $135 of value after accounting for those additional points. Element did substantially better.

But Thursday wasn’t the same as Friday or Saturday. We were arriving by Eurostar from London and needed to get to an evening field hockey game in Abcoude, south of Amsterdam. citizenM’s location made that particularly easy. So rather than force one hotel to be the answer for the entire weekend, we gave citizenM one job.

Having now stayed there, I think that decision worked even better than I expected.

citizenM Amsterdam Amstel isn’t in the thick of Amsterdam’s most tourist-heavy center, but neither does it feel remotely suburban. It’s around the outer edge of the central canal area, with canals, restaurants and plenty of Amsterdam street life almost immediately outside.

From Amsterdam Centraal, getting there was exceptionally easy. We walked out of the station and down to the metro, tapped our credit cards at the gate and took one of the southbound lines, 51, 53 or 54. Three stops later we were at Weesperplein. The map on my phone initially persuaded us that we needed to cross the road after leaving the station. We didn’t. Weesperplein has several exits, and we’d happened to emerge from one less than half a block from the hotel.

The whole exercise reinforced why I’d chosen citizenM for this particular night. There was virtually no arrival-day logistics problem to solve.

If you’ve never stayed at citizenM, it doesn’t take long to work out that this isn’t Marriott with some red furniture added. The hotel occupies a substantial traditional brick building, but once through the doors the citizenM design language takes over. There is art everywhere, bright furniture, shelves of deliberately eclectic objects, oversized photographs, red accents and little bits of humor scattered around the property. I liked it.

Check-in is designed to be mostly self-service. There are several terminals rather than a conventional front desk, with a staff member available to step in and help with the parts that require human intervention. We were the only people checking in at the time, so I didn’t get to see whether the system really does allow one employee to keep several arrivals moving simultaneously, but presumably that’s the idea.

As a Marriott Platinum member, the screen offered me either 500 Bonvoy points or €9 per person in food-and-beverage credit. For two of us, €18 was worth roughly $21. The 500 Bonvoy points were worth about $3.65 using the 0.73¢ valuation I’d already used when analyzing the redemption. That wasn’t a difficult decision.

The photos probably explain citizenM’s concept better than I can. Upstairs, the guestrooms are extremely efficient. Downstairs, the hotel has devoted a surprising amount of space to people actually hanging around. There are sofas, armchairs, long communal tables, work areas and smaller seating groups spread through a series of interconnected spaces.

The bar sits at the center of it all rather than being tucked into a corner. It doesn’t really feel like a conventional hotel lobby. It’s closer to an oversized shared living room. And unlike some design-heavy hotels where the lobby looks good but gives you little reason to use it, we actually did.

After returning from the hockey that evening, we stopped at the bar for drinks and some food. We tried the Japanese fried chicken, meatballs and Korean fried mushrooms. All three were good; the Japanese chicken was good enough that my wife went back for seconds. Add a couple of Heinekens for me and wine for her and we had no difficulty consuming the €18 credit, plus a little more. There is also complimentary still and sparkling water downstairs, with bottles you can fill and take back to your room. There were already two small bottles of still water waiting upstairs, but as people who go through a lot of sparkling water, we appreciated that one.

Even the lobby toilets got involved. The image of the elaborately dressed regal-looking gentleman staring back from the wall had me chuckling.

This is probably the part of citizenM that will determine whether you like the concept. The room isn’t large.

The bed occupies the entire space at one end of it. A long shelf beneath the window doubles as the desk. Clothing storage is an open hanging space rather than a conventional wardrobe. Drawers are built underneath the bed.

The sink is in the main room, while the shower and toilet share a compact glass enclosure immediately alongside the bed. Look at the photographs and it seems as though it ought to feel cramped. Curiously, it didn’t. The large window probably deserves some of the credit. It spans most of one wall, bringing in a lot of daylight and giving our room a leafy outlook across the surrounding buildings.

The long surface underneath it creates usable space without adding bulky furniture, and there isn’t much in the room that doesn’t need to be there. The result is a room with low square footage that didn’t particularly feel like one.

There is also an interesting choice at the center of the design: citizenM hasn’t responded to limited space by giving you a small bed. The bed is a good size, but there’s essentially no bedside floor space. I’d never really thought about it before, but why do we need it? As long as you’re comfortable approaching the bed from the foot, slotting a normal-sized bed into what is almost a booth is a very efficient use of space.

And, somewhat to my surprise, it was very comfortable. At first glance it looked almost stark, particularly with only two pillows. I’m normally inclined to want at least two pillows just for myself. But the mattress was nicely firm and the pillows were large and supportive rather than collapsing into nothing as soon as you put your head on them. We slept extremely well.

That’s probably the smartest part of the room design. citizenM has sacrificed circulation space, conventional furniture and a separate bathroom sink before sacrificing the thing you’re primarily renting a hotel room to use.

There are a few things that take adjustment. The sink being in the bedroom rather than the bathroom is the most obvious. Beneath it was a compartment that looked like a refrigerator but seemed to operate at something closer to “cool” than actual refrigerator temperature.

There’s no in-room coffee setup either. That bothered me less than it might have because the coffee downstairs was very good. The following morning I went down, picked up a couple of Americanos and brought them back to the room. We skipped breakfast entirely and ended up doing the coffee run twice before leaving.

The room also leans heavily into technology. A tablet beside the bed acts as the control center, while the television greets you by name. It fits with the rest of the hotel: standardized, deliberately designed and slightly playful rather than attempting to recreate a conventional hotel room in miniature.

For a hotel that has clearly thought rather carefully about efficiency, citizenM has one wonderfully inefficient feature.

There are two elevators next to one another. They apparently serve the same floors. And each has its own call button. Pressing the button beside one elevator doesn’t call the other. You can therefore either attempt to determine which elevator is likely to arrive first or do what any rational person eventually does and press both buttons.

I’m sure there’s an explanation. I just don’t know what it is. It seemed particularly incongruous in a country where almost everything else about getting from A to B appears to have been designed by people with very little tolerance for nonsense.

After checking in, we dropped our bags and walked about half a block to the canal for lunch at Bar Lempicka. We sat outside beside the water with a Dutch mezze-style plate of hummus and roasted vegetables alongside cheese sticks and beef croquettes, watching Amsterdam go past. From our table we could also observe the cyclists confronting one of the Netherlands’ rarer geographical features: the slight incline onto a bridge.

That evening, getting to Abcoude was straightforward too. We returned to Weesperplein, took the metro two stops south to Amsterdam Amstel, changed onto an NS Sprinter and rode 12 minutes to Abcoude.

The next morning demonstrated the other side of the location. With a 4pm late checkout confirmed through my Marriott Platinum status, we had most of the day. We walked toward Amsterdam’s museum district, stopped for lunch along the way and visited Moco Museum. We returned by a different route through the streets and canals and still arrived back at citizenM with plenty of time before checkout. So while citizenM had originally won Thursday because of the transport map, staying there revealed that the location worked perfectly well for actually enjoying Amsterdam too.

Checkout returned us to the little self-service terminals. We presented the key, the machine brought up the bill with our €18 food-and-beverage credit correctly applied, and we were asked to present a card for the balance.

Because I used a US-dollar card, the machine helpfully offered to charge me in dollars instead, with an additional €4 currency charge. No thank you.

Even without the disclosed €4 charge, my answer to dynamic currency conversion is almost invariably to pay in the local currency and let my card issuer handle the conversion. EUR selected, payment completed, key returned. Done.

Yes. And I think that’s a slightly different conclusion from the one I might have predicted when I booked it. citizenM was not the strongest redemption in my original Amsterdam spreadsheet. Element extracted considerably more value from each of my expiring Marriott certificates.

But hotels aren’t spreadsheets. For Thursday, citizenM needed to get us easily from Amsterdam Centraal to a hotel, let us enjoy some of the city during the afternoon, get us efficiently out to Abcoude that evening, give us somewhere comfortable to sleep, and leave us well positioned for another half-day exploring Amsterdam before moving on.

It did all of those things. More surprisingly, the compact room never felt like much of a compromise. The bed was excellent, the public spaces were genuinely useful, the bar food and coffee were good, the staff were friendly, and the hotel had considerably more personality than I expected from a highly standardized chain.

The original optimization exercise concluded that citizenM was the best hotel for Thursday, even though it wasn’t the best redemption.

After actually staying there, I think we got that right.

Three Expiring Marriott FNCs: A Different Optimization Problem

WWWT: Moco Museum Amsterdam

Element review (to come)