The Moxy Washington, D.C. Downtown was the second hotel on our trip built around the All Blacks-Springboks match in Baltimore. After our first night at the Park Hyatt Washington D.C., we moved across town for a very different second night.
The Moxy cost $165.92, but the room rate wasn’t the main reason I booked it. Earlier in the year I’d spent about $240 at the Moxy Wynwood in Miami, leaving me short of completing an Amex Offer that returned $150 after $375 of Marriott spend. Prepaying the Washington stay pushed me over the threshold shortly before the offer expired, and the $150 statement credit posted a few days later.
That didn’t make this a $15.92 hotel stay. The earlier Miami spending was necessary to trigger the same credit. But with another night in D.C. to book anyway, the Moxy was a particularly useful place to put the remaining Marriott spend.
The Moxy Washington, D.C. Downtown.
A Very Moxy Lobby
Anyone familiar with Moxy will recognize the setup fairly quickly. The ground floor is less conventional hotel lobby than bar and communal living space, with sofas, long work tables, games and plenty of places to sit. Check-in takes place at the bar.
The ground-floor lobby at the Moxy.
There is more communal space upstairs, including tables, sofas, meeting areas and a self-service coffee station. Given how compact the guest rooms are, those spaces provide somewhere else to work or sit without having to remain in the room.
More seating and communal space upstairs.
The self-service coffee station.
At check-in, my Marriott Platinum welcome choice was points or a $10 food-and-beverage credit. I chose the credit. We were also given two casino-style tokens that staff told us could be redeemed for drinks from the bar or refrigerator.
Those tokens would become slightly more complicated than they initially sounded.
Our Room
Our room followed the compact Moxy formula closely. The bed occupied most of the space beside a wall of windows, with a chair near the entrance but no conventional desk or substantial storage furniture.
Instead, hangers, a mirror and several pieces of folding furniture were mounted along the wall.
Our room at the Moxy Washington, D.C. Downtown.
The room had a wall of large windows overlooking the surrounding D.C. buildings, with plenty of daylight.
The windows brought plenty of daylight into the room.
The view from our room.
Storage, seating and the bathroom were fitted into a narrow space beside the bed.
The Bathroom
The bathroom is separated from the bedroom by black-framed translucent glass panels, with the shower forming part of the same enclosure.
The bathroom and shower sit inside a translucent glass enclosure.
Inside, there was a compact open vanity, toilet and a good-sized walk-in shower with a rainfall shower head and wall-mounted toiletries.
We’d encountered a very similar setup at the Moxy Wynwood earlier in the year. One difference was welcome: the shower floor here didn’t have the slipperiness we’d experienced in Miami.
The Safe Was a Bigger Problem
One room feature was less successful. The safe appeared to work. It accepted a code, allowed us to press the lock button and made the noises you’d expect from a safe securing itself. There was no obvious indication that anything had gone wrong.
But the door hadn’t locked. That is worse than a safe that clearly doesn’t work. Someone could put valuables inside, enter a code, hear the mechanism operate and leave the room believing everything was secured. It was only because I pulled on the door afterward that I discovered it would still open.
We were there for one night and heading out, so rather than spend time trying to get it fixed we took our valuables with us. But a failed safe should fail in an obvious way. This one created a false impression that it had locked.
The Tokens Got More Complicated
Later that day we stopped at the downstairs bar for a drink. I expected to use the two tokens we’d been given at check-in, but the bartender told us to hold onto them.
When we came through again after dinner, another member of staff suggested we could use them at the rooftop bar. So later that evening we went upstairs to Lucha Rosa for a few drinks.
That turned out not to be the case. The rooftop staff told us the Moxy tokens weren’t accepted. We couldn’t charge the drinks to our hotel room either, and the bartender indicated that Lucha Rosa wasn’t part of the hotel in the way I’d assumed. Lucha Rosa is on the hotel’s rooftop but is operated by Atlas Restaurant Group rather than the Moxy itself, which may explain some of the confusion over where the Moxy tokens could be used.
We paid directly using my Citi Strata Elite. The charge coded as restaurant spend, earning 6x ThankYou points.
Breakfast Eventually Used Them
The following morning, we picked up two breakfast sandwiches and two cold drinks from the food area beside reception.
The bar and grab-and-go area on the ground floor.
This time the front desk accepted our two remaining tokens against the cold drinks and charged the rest to the room. We then went upstairs for complimentary coffee and took everything back to our room.
Breakfast back in the room.
There was still the $10 Platinum food-and-beverage credit to deal with. At checkout I presented the voucher we’d been given, only to be told that I should have used it when we bought breakfast rather than at checkout.
In the end, the front desk indicated there was no further balance to pay. My card nevertheless received a $6.60 charge, so I never completely reconciled how the tokens, $10 credit and breakfast charges were applied. We certainly received more than $10 of breakfast value, but the mechanics were harder to follow than the amounts involved justified.
Why the Booking Made Sense
The room itself was $165.92 prepaid. More importantly for the original booking decision, that payment completed the Marriott Amex Offer I’d started with the earlier Moxy Wynwood stay. The offer required $375 of Marriott spend and returned $150; the Washington prepayment pushed the cumulative spend over the threshold and the statement credit posted.
I wouldn’t allocate the entire $150 credit to this stay. About $240 of earlier Marriott spending was also required to earn it. But this was exactly the kind of situation in which an otherwise ordinary hotel booking can become useful: I needed the room, the rate was acceptable, and it completed an offer that would otherwise have expired unfinished.
That was the reason the Moxy made sense when I booked it, and nothing that happened at the hotel changed that calculation.
Bottom Line
The Moxy Washington, D.C. Downtown did what we needed from our second night in D.C. The room was compact, there was plenty of communal space elsewhere in the hotel, and the location worked for our plans.
The stranger parts were operational rather than fundamental. The welcome tokens produced conflicting instructions, the $10 breakfast credit was more cumbersome to use than it needed to be, and the safe was the one issue I would regard as genuinely poor rather than merely quirky.
For $165.92, with the booking also completing a $150 Marriott Amex Offer, I’d make the same decision again. The booking worked better than some of the small details of the stay did.