Originally Posted by sdsearch

Quality Suites is not a separate brand. It's just how they label a Quality Inn that's mostly or completely suites of some sort. (Suites in Choice brands may just mean a partial room divider between the sleeping area and a sitting area, or they may mean actual two-room suites.)

Similarly, Clarion Inn, Clarion Hotel, and Clarion Suites are not separate brands from each other. They're "sub-brands" if you wish (at least now; I don't know if at some point in the past they may have been considered more separate).

The only one that seems to be a different brand (per the icons on the Choice Hotels website) is Comfort Suites, which has a very different logo than Comfort Inn. There's only logo for Clarion, and there's only logo I've seen for Quality. (The one Qualify Suites I've seen, which has since converted to Country Inn & Suites by Carlson, had the same look logo as Quality Inn uses. It had/has true two-room suites, btw.)

And then, it depends what countries you're talking about. Because overseas, there is Comfort Hotel, which I don't think I've seen in the US. There's also Clarion Collection overseas.

I know one hotel that converted from Comfort Suites to Comfort Inn & Suites (because not enough of its room were suites for Choice to want them to keep the Comfort Suites name) and then to Clarion Inn, which started with a bistro-style quasi-restaurant but is morphing into a free breakfast buffet (morphing all too slowly!). It's a three story multi-building outdoor corridors property in coastal SoCal (where there are tons of outdoor corridor properties).

Regarding now vs the past: I can imagine when Choice had way fewer brands, I might have distinguished what are now sub-brands more as separate brands perhaps, but as they added more and more brands, that wouldn't have made sense any more, so they would have "consolidated" into sub-brands of brands. That's just a theory. I don't know how to look up the logos that Choice used in 1990 to see how the division of brands was then compared to what it is today. Hmm... that just got me thinking, I wonder if people sell old Choice (and other hotel program) directories on eBay? (I may have a printed Choice directory somewhere at home, but if so it's probably no more than a decade old, which wouldn't be old enough to have big differences in branding from today, I would think.)