These words refer to buildings or groups of buildings that are set up to provide living quarters for customers, especially on a temporary basis. Hotel usually refers to a single building, large or small, in which rooms or suites are rented out on a fixed basis: hotels jammed by country visitors at Show time. A hotel may be licensed (to serve alcoholic beverages) or unlicensed; if the latter, it is known as a private hotel. Although the word most often suggests accommodation for travellers or transients, it may apply also to more permanent arrangements: She had lived in a city hotel for 15 years. Similar to a private hotel is the guest house or boarding house . These are frequently converted homes or older buildings; they differ in prestige and hence in tariff. The guest house , like the private hotel , generally caters for short stays but is not quite so elegant. Nevertheless, it is superior to a boarding house , which more usually caters for guests over extended periods, e.g., single workers away from their homes. The term pub (short for public house) may be used informally to designate a hotel in a general sense:

• Which pub did you stay at in Rome?

But more often it specifically indicates the bar section of the establishment: a city where the pubs are open till ten o’clock; a no-hoper who spends most of his time in the pub . Of the two words, hotel places the stronger emphasis on accommodation: every hotel was booked out for the spring racing carnival.

Hostel represents an older borrowing from the same source word as hotel and once meant the same thing. Now it refers largely to one of a chain of lodging houses for young people on walking, cycling or motoring tours, or for those residing temporarily in a strange city: He planned his European itinerary so that each night would put him near a different hostel ; While in Auckland she stayed at the Y.W.C.A. Hostel . In another sense, the word refers to accommodation provided by a charitable organization for the shelter and care of the aged, incapacitated or destitute: a Salvation Army hostel .

Motel is a portmanteau word for motor hotel ; it refers to a roadside building or, often a group of buildings, such as a cluster of cabins, where people travelling by car may obtain lodgings: an attempt to choose among several motels that lay strung out along the highway. A recent variation of the motel is a seaside boatel , which provides moorings for small craft and overnight accommodation for their owners.

The old English words tavern and inn refer to establishments whose modern counterparts, broadly speaking, are a licensed restaurant and a hotel respectively. Tavern originally meant a public house offering food and drink (usually wine, as distinct from an alehouse) but not accommodation. As such, it functioned as a local rendezvous and place of recreation. An inn did provide accommodation as well as food and drink, but was not permitted to be used as a mere tippling place. Both words have currency in America although not in Britain itself – except in the names of many famous inns and taverns that have survived through the centuries. Neither word is commonly used in Australia or New Zealand, but, since both have archaic and convivial qualities, they are sometimes used to name any sort of restaurant, licensed or not. Inn , which strongly suggests a rustic setting, sometimes serves as an atmospheric substitute for motel : a motor inn .