Boston was described to me as the most English of American cities. Yet the city seems to go to great pains to remove any trace of the enemy (or Redcoats) as the tour guides keep calling the English. The city makes more boasts about its Irish or Italian antecedents than about the English settlers who landed here first in the 16th Century. Our English dead are interred in unmarked graves (no Commonwealth War Graves Commission here) and the English graves in the Boston cemeteries are ceremonially marked with the Stars and Stripes on Memorial Day despite the fact that many died decades before the United States was born

The Courtyard on Tremont is a short walk from Boston Common and the heart of the city’s red marked heritage trail. It too is in an historic building, this one a lodge built in the days of prohibition in 1925. History echoes here too, with antique telephone boxes, deco mail drop system and the stairs to where the speakeasy was,all pointed out proudly. History is present too in the plasterwork and murals, the double height reception area and the layout of the building. It is in many ways then quite untypical of the Courtyard brand.

Previously HotelDesigns has looked at new-build European Courtyards and it was the desire to make a comparison that drove me to want to look at the operation of the parent brand. I grabbed at the chance when the opportunity came to visit Marriott’s Boston operations, and the Courtyard proved to be a very interesting, if somewhat unrepresentative property. It is the 16th hotel and seventh of the large brands at this level we have featured, and they make for interesting comparisons.

Located on Tremont Street the hotel is about a hundred yards from the site of the new Boston ‘W’, and across the road from a major theatre and close to a hospital complex. Adjacent to a subway station it is a good central location for anyone visiting the city, but is popular as a central business hotel. One of the differences between US Courtyards and those in the UK is the lack of a full restaurant service, US courtyards offering instead a full breakfast. Here there is a burger bar on the street frontage which has a door from the reception lobby making quick meals easy but there are plenty of good restaurants in easy walking distance. The burger bar has a bar and night club and unfortunately for the hotel this seems to generate complaints about noise in some of the bedrooms. Maybe Marriott should buy out the operator and use the space to enlarge their cramped breakfast area that cannot service the 315 rooms and 7 meeting rooms the hotel contains.