What is the difference between a hotel and a motel?

Years ago -- decades, in fact -- some state tourism office down in Florida offered a prize, somewhere in the mid five figures, to anyone who could come up with an answer to that question that would be authoritative enough to generate agreement by all as to a proper definition, and thus written into law whenever a legal distinction had to be made or acknowledged.

The prize remains unclaimed to this day*.

The closest anyone has ever come to a definition that has met with some agreement, is based upon the means of access to the rooms: Hotels - with some exceptions - have interior corridors, and you leave your car in a parking lot, enter through a main lobby, maybe take an elevator, and walk down an interior hallway to your room. Motels (the term 'motel' originated as a portmanteau word for 'motor hotel') have exterior corridors: you can park directly in front of your room (quite often, if you're on the ground floor, you can park directly in front of your door).

Usually.

Why do high-end hotels insist on charging for Wi-Fi service or "resort fees"?

It's sleazy, black-hat marketing. They count on you to pay it rather than kick up a fuss. Often, they will remove the charge if you persist in objecting after they make one attempt to 'explain' it to you (they try that much because some people will, however willingly or grudgingly, come around with an attempt at explanation). It's like that catch on FreeCreditReport.com and similar sites that you don't notice in the fine print, that signs you up in some sort of 'savings club' having a very unclear, if any, purpose, at a $3.00 monthly charge on your credit card bill: a lot of people let it slide, at least for a few months, rather than call them up, wait on hold for twenty minutes, and demand to cancel the 'enrollment'.

One of my own pet peeves in that area is that dollar per night extra charge that gets tacked on to your bill for 'insurance' on the contents of your in-room safe, whether you use the safe or not. Most people don't notice it. Even the contract with the safe supplier provides that the hotel is supposed to take it off if someone complains about it. There may even be a case where an in-room safe was broken into, someone made a claim on that insurance, and the insurance paid off the claim, but I'm not aware of any.

Do hotel cleaning people sometimes steal items from the rooms of their guests?

Rarely. You might be surprised, if you've never worked in a hotel, just how so.

Even the dumbest room attendant knows that whatever the temptation, if it happens, the guest will say something right away as soon as he or she notices the item missing, and there's always a record of who cleaned which room. In most hotels - and in any well-run hotel - there's just no way to do it and not get found out. And busted. Very quickly.

And any hotel owner or manager (who aren't always necessarily smarter than the housekeepers) knows that if a problem develops, unless it's addressed and dealt with immediately and conclusively, he or she is going to lose control of how to contain it. (For example, once a police car rolls up, which will happen if it's an item of any serious value, there's going to be an investigation, which means housekeepers being interviewed - on company time - by the cops.) So there is no incentive for a hotel owner or manager to cover up for (or even put up with) one or more sticky-fingered housekeepers, and at least some disincentive for even the grungiest manager of even the rattiest motel to tolerate it. Usually when there's a problem, it's the fault of weak or incompetent management, not complicit management.

I'll give you a pair of travel tips.

Hotel Management: What is a healthy ratio of food & beverage revenue to room revenue?

Zero to irrelevant. (I'm not being a wise guy. I'm serious.)

• If you have a limited service or select service operation with a breakfast, manager's reception, or snacks and sodas provided to attendees of your events in whatever meeting or small conference space you have; then you have no f&b revenue or, if you do (say, the eight to ten bucks you can be asked to pay for a cooked-to-order breakfast at a Hilton Garden Inn), food is only incidental to your main business of renting the rooms, or renting the conference facility. The $8-10 you charge for breakfast at a Hyatt Place (another one of those new, 'upscale select service' brands that, along with Hilton Garden Inn, are a growing segment of the business . . .) will take the edge off the cost of providing it, but will not amount to a significant revenue source by comparison to your room charges - if it even completely covers the cost of providing the food.

How often are items purchased from hotel minibars?

We don't mess with them. All of the things that Stacy Jean noted in her answer to the question (Stacy Jean's answer ), we noticed years and years ago.

Don't assume that everything that shows up in a hotel is a 'profit center' simply because it comes at a price. Sometimes, it's simply there for guest convenience. (Indeed, many people miss many of the things that, over the years, have been eliminated because it neither can be provided at a good enough profit for the hotel to be much of a 'profit center', nor can the hotel give it out as a free amenity; and in either case, can be provided at the cost of more bother than it's worth. See Michael Forrest Jones' answer to What features of restaurants and hotels have almost completely vanished? .)

Long-distance telephone is one modern-day example: the 'profit' from it is negligible, unless you price it so high that the guest feels like she's been gouged when the call shows up on her bill. Indeed, even Red Roof Inns offer it as a free amenity. (And Red Roof is an economy chain: one of the things that go with successfully running an economy property is aggressively watching the bottom line - and watching it with the free amenities, especially those that you can't limit a guest's use of.)

What is the actual average length of time (in minutes) for hotel check-in and check-out?

It depends on the hotel and the amount of paperwork involved.

Assuming minimal interaction with the guest, no problems with room availability or the reservation at check-in, and no problems with a bill or guest complaint at check-out; I'd say that 2-3 minutes for a check-in, about half that much for a check-out, is doable.

This is what I could shoot for at a well-run Choice or Best Western property.

Originally appeared on Quora

Is there a demand for a well-designed hotel website service?

Nothing would please me more. If the cost were modest, I'd probably use it even for hotels that don't really 'need' it. (Franchised properties, and Best Western member properties, each have their own webpages on the big brand site. They might have a static website of their own, but click the 'reservation' link, and you go to the franchise organization's reservation page for that property.)

But that's just me.

The problem you're going to encounter in marketing such a thing is that owners of franchised properties expect the franchise to hand them everything - and if they don't, it's presumably because they don't have it to give. If the owner has a 72-room property, he expects the central reservations system to send him fifty new reservations a night. In real life, it doesn't work that way. So, he concludes, it's not possible: after all, Choice and Wyndham are professionals. Or, if it's a corporate-owned property, they might hire an in-house sales director, who'll try to pull it off by soliciting personal connections and face-to-face contacts in the area - 'sales' without any good marketing. There seems to be no convincing people that better can be expected or demanded of a hotel website.

The problem you're going to encounter with franchise organizations is, they're collecting fees and royalties on what they have at minimal investment to themselves, so why should they invest in anything more? (Likewise, why should a grungy biker bar with tattoo-covered topless dancers spend the money to renovate into an upscale gentlemen's club? They're already making all the money they can imagine with exactly what they have, and the overhead is as low as it can get . . . You get the idea.)




Here's my wish list: Stand by for lots of edits - and additions - over coming months: I'm just getting started. And I intend to never finish - this business is constantly evolving. (Anyone who tells you otherwise probably runs an older property with a badly dated '70's appearance that smells musty and is probably in need of serious renovations.)

Rate configurability:

I want more than 'Best Available Rate', AAA-AARP, and whatever whiz-bang promotion the franchise organization has going that, as often as not, has your hotel renting a room for next to nothing so the franchise as a 'whole' can benefit. One feature of a very suite-intensive (if not all-suites in all locations) new brand that we're working on (http://pinterest.com/beechmont27... , if you want an advance sneak peek) is going to be a rack rate that drops automatically if you request a stay of three days or more, and again if you request a stay of a week or more.