Originally Posted by
Will Stonehocker
And what y'all should understand is that I don't bother with letter number codes when it comes to knowing which hotel first came into existence. What does CA800 mean? IDK, my math skills have been declining since 8th grade.
If you go to choicehotels.com and do a search for hotels, and then click on just hover over each hotel name, you'll see that URL contains the two-letter three-digit code for the hotel at the end of URL. (Well, they ran out of digits, so some of them are actually three-letter two-digit codes, where the third letter acts a digit beyond 9). So the current Comfort Inn & Suite Orange County John Wayne Airport shows CA800, which it's had since it was a Comfort Suites (and then a Clarion before the current Comfort Inn & Suites moniker). Similarly, the current Blvd Hotel, Ascend Hotel Collection in Costa Mesa shows CA401, which it's had since it was a Comfort Inn (it was CA401 as Comfort Inn, then it left Choice when it first became Blvd Hotel, and then it rejoined Choice once again as CA401 when Choice accepted it into the fairly new Ascend Hotel Collection).
There are few more hotels in the Orange County are with low-number-looking codes like CA002 or CA102.
I get the impression (but I'm not sure) that the first digit is the original hotel branding, and the last two digits are the sequence of hotels in that branding in that state.
If my impression is correct, that would mean that CA800 was the first CA8 in California, and CA401 was the second CA4 in California, and CA002 would be the third CA0 in California. (The CA clearly means California.)
I don't know the history of any still-with-Choice properties outside of this SNA airport area (and thus CA800 and CA401). If you know of other hotels still in the Choice program and their history, you can look at the end of their URLs to see what their codes are, perhaps with that additional data we'll get more insight on the meaning of the first digit after the state (did 8 mean Comfort Suites? did 4 mean Comfort Inn?). With just two examples where I know the history and know that the codes don't change when the hotel rebrands but stays with (or comes back to) the Choice program, I can't come to firm conclusions yet. We'd have to find an example of more hotels which started as Comfort Suites and are still with Choice to see if they all show XX8NN, and we'd have to find an example of more hotels which started as Comfort Inn and are still with Choice to see they all show XX4NN (ie, a two-letter state code, then 8 or 4, then two other digits which are presumably some sort of zero-based sequence designation).