Also American, and as I understood it, hotels were traditionally in town but when people started taking more long distance driving trips, people opened "motoris

Also American, and as I understood it, hotels were traditionally in town but when people started taking more long distance driving trips, people opened "motorist hotels" (aka, motels) along highways and common driving routes. Even today, with chains often blurring the lines, I still think of the old-school, single story row of rooms as a motel and the taller ones as hotels. It's not because of the original reasons anymore since you can have a high rise along the highway and serving a similar purpose. But since I was a kid, the cheap one-story drive-up ones were still called motels whereas the bigger multi-story chain places were marketed as hotels. I agree that the lines have blurred but I still consider a motel as a subset of hotels.