Meliá Hotels International’s ME Miami to open March 3

Miami’s pulsing arts and culture scene is attracting a new hotel brand to downtown.

For its first foray into the U.S. market, the international ME by Meliá brand has chosen Miami. ME Miami hotel will open its doors March 3 at 1100 Biscayne Blvd. in the former place of 56-room Casa Moderna, previously known as Tempo.

The new brand aims to attract creative-minded world travelers and turn the hotel into a social hub primed for guest interaction, said Olivier Servat, ME Miami’s general manager.

“What’s cool for you when you’re traveling? It has to do with who is there, who am I going to meet there, what are the kind of people and the kind of profile that enjoy going to that hotel,” Servat said.

Miami’s growing art scene in Wynwood, the Design District and downtown drew Meliá’s attention to downtown Miami as the ideal location to expand its contemporary brand, Servat said. The hotel’s location, immediately across the boulevard from the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science, fits its cultural orientation.

ME by Meliá has seven other hotels worldwide, in Cabo, Cancun, London, Ibiza, Madrid, Mallorca and Milan.

The Miami hotel will bring brand recognizable to Latin American travelers. Though Spanish company Meliá Hotels International has its U.S. headquarters in Miami, none of its 350 lodgings is located in South Florida.

“Miami was, for us, something that was making a lot of sense,” Servat said, because of its Latin American influence, creating a “stunning combination where you have a lot of artists, a lot of character.”

According to Hotels.com, rates for the 129-room ME Miami, weekend rates in mid-April begin at $350 for a standard room and at about $640 for a standard suite.

Among the hotel’s features is an “aura” manager — a concierge to connect with guests prior to their stay to help coordinate any special accommodations.

Pets will get the star treatment, too. Each pet-accompanied guest will find treats, pet toiletries and a chef-prepared pet food menu.

Human guests can swim in one of two pools, wind down at the hotel’s spa and eat at the hotel’s STK Rebel steakhouse from The ONE Group, which owns STK restaurants in multiple locations in the the U.S. and Europe.

The main objective, Servat said, is to surprise guests — and leave an impression.

“The stay at the hotel is not the most important thing. The most important thing is what you are going to remember about your stay in Miami,” Servat said. “Giorgio Armani used to say something that I like to think about: ‘It’s nice to be noticed. It’s better to be remembered.’ I think this is exactly what we want to do here.”

This story was originally published January 26, 2016 at 6:32 PM with the headline "Meliá Hotels International’s ME Miami to open March 3."