Speaking as an American, to me "hotel" and "motel" mean exactly the same thing. But "hotel" is the more usual word.
A motel (portmanteau of "motor hotel") is a low-lying, often ground-level, structure oriented toward motorists, usually featuring separate exterior entrances to each suite. Visitors are usually able to park right next to their suite, for easily moving items to and from their vehicle.
The word comes from America, and seems to originally have been a proper noun serving as the name of a motor hotel chain: https://www.etymonline.com/word/motel
Having recently thought a lot about this after being tricked into staying in a place listed on booking.com as an "inn", but which upon arrival was clearly a motel, this is definitely the defining feature of a motel: if I can access the room through an exterior entrance without passing through the interior of the building (a lobby), it's a motel and not a hotel.
In smaller motels all rooms have car access (on the ground floor of course). In larger ones, as the expand, they often add extra rooms with no road access.
And inversely, there are smaller places where cars can be parked outside, but are called hotels.
Nowadays it more how fancy they are and how much you pay, which makes them call them "hotel" vs "motel", as opposed to
(That said, I've never seen an establishment without parking outside/next to the building called a motel).
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.
Note: I am American, too.
> "Hotel," according to Merriam-Webster, originated in the year 1765 and comes from a French word for an establishment that provides lodging, meals and other services.
> "Motel" came along much later, in 1925, according to Merriam-Webster. It blends the words "motor" and "hotel" and is meant to describe an establishment that provides some, but not necessarily all of the services associated with a hotel. Motels, according to San Jose State University communications professor Andrew Wood, are an entirely American phenomenon: They originated as inns along the country's first major motorways, offering rest to weary explorers and families on vacation.
> Hotels and motels differ in layout and construction. Hotels can contain hundreds of rooms and several floors; they generally have staircases, elevators and internal corridors that lead to the rooms. Motels commonly have a one- or two-floor layout and guests access their rooms directly from the parking lot.
> Some hotels, especially those in the luxury-accommodations realm, exhibit specific styles of architecture and design, such as the Waldorf Astoria of New York. Motels typically have a more utilitarian construction.
https://traveltips.usatoday.com/difference-between-hotels-mo...
Regarding French, note that many words that have a circumflex-o in modern French correspond to "os" words in English. Like hôpital -> hospital.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumflex_in_French#Indicatio...
So "hotel" is basically a re-import of "hostel" from French which had become "hôtel" due to the lost phoneme. So now we have both hostel and hotel.
All of the words hotel, hostel, hospital and related words ultimately come from the Latin word hospitale (inn, large house).