US hotel universe, mapped
There are 91,797 hotels in the US. We map each property and the owner who actually buys.
For PMS, revenue management, channel manager, F and B supply, and in-room tech teams selling into hospitality. The flag on the building is rarely the buyer. The owner sitting in the asset management meeting is.
The market, in three numbers
A franchised industry, owned by independents.
guest rooms across 91,797 properties
Roughly 63 rooms per property on average. The shape ranges from a 35-room rural Super 8 to a 3,000-room Las Vegas resort. The math hides the segment split, which is why brand-level data alone is the wrong tool.
of US branded hotels are franchised
Wyndham, Choice, Marriott, Hilton, and IHG run franchise models. The brand collects fees and sets standards. The owner holds the asset, signs the loan, and writes the checks for your software.
are independent or soft-branded
Roughly four in ten US hotels fly no major flag at all, or run on a soft brand like Tapestry, Curio, or Trademark. Independents are the long tail no enterprise sales team can name without a list.
Sources: AHLA State of the Industry 2024 ownership breakdown; STR US chain-affiliation census; Orbital property-by-property map, April 2026.
Methodology
Why our hotel count moves and the published estimates do not.
The headline figure of 91,797 properties comes from the AHLA 2024 State of the Industry. It is the right number for a once-a-year benchmark, and the wrong number for outbound this quarter. New builds open, properties reflag, ownership groups buy and sell. We work property by property and refresh.
How the 91,797 figure is built
- Start with every active US lodging property. Cross-referenced against the AHLA universe, the STR property census, and the US Census County Business Patterns NAICS 721110 (hotels and motels) series. Vacation rentals and short-term-rental inventory are scoped out.
- Resolve each property to a real ownership entity. The flag is the franchise agreement. The asset is held by an LLC, a REIT, or a private ownership group. The third-party operator running the property is often a third party again. Three layers, one decision-maker per layer.
- Find the owner and the asset manager. Most independent and small-group owners do not run a corporate website. We find them by name, with a verified email and a direct dial, the same way we do for every other long-tail vertical.
- Drop the dead pins. Closed properties, conversions to multifamily, hurricane-damaged sites still on the registry, and brand-stripped properties between flags. The annual report keeps them on for a year. We do not.
- Refresh on a rolling schedule. Property-level signals run continuously against the universe of US small and mid-market businesses, so what you query in June is not what shipped in January.
If you want the source breakdown for a specific state or flag, ask. We do not hide the working.
By state
Where the hotel rooms actually are.
The five largest states carry about a quarter of the US property count. Per capita, vacation-economy states like Nevada and Hawaii sit far above the coasts. Las Vegas alone holds the largest single-market guest-room count in the country, despite a property count well below Florida or Texas.
| # | State | Hotels | Per 100k residents |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Florida | 5,400 | 23 |
| 2 | California | 5,200 | 13 |
| 3 | Texas | 5,100 | 16 |
| 4 | New York | 3,600 | 18 |
| 5 | Nevada | 1,200 | 37 |
| 6 | Georgia | 3,300 | 29 |
| 7 | North Carolina | 2,900 | 27 |
| 8 | Tennessee | 2,500 | 35 |
| 9 | Virginia | 2,400 | 27 |
| 10 | Ohio | 2,300 | 19 |
| 11 | Illinois | 2,200 | 18 |
| 12 | Pennsylvania | 2,100 | 16 |
| 13 | South Carolina | 2,000 | 37 |
| 14 | Michigan | 1,900 | 19 |
| 15 | Arizona | 1,700 | 23 |
Counts rounded to the nearest hundred for display. The dataset itself is exact, down to the street address and brand flag. The highest-density metros for hotel rooms are Las Vegas, Orlando, New York City, and Los Angeles. Source: Orbital property-by-property map, April 2026; per-capita math against US Census 2024 population estimates.
The top ten brand families
The largest US footprints, by property count.
Property count and room count tell different stories. Wyndham leads on properties because it franchises thousands of economy and midscale flags. Marriott and Hilton lead on rooms because their upscale and luxury portfolios skew larger. The owner you call is rarely the parent brand either way.
| # | Company | US properties | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wyndham | ~6,200 | Days Inn, Super 8, La Quinta, Ramada, Howard Johnson, Wyndham Garden. Pure-play franchisor. Wyndham owns almost none of the buildings. |
| 2 | Choice Hotels | ~6,000 | Comfort, Quality, Sleep, Clarion, Cambria, Ascend. Strong in midscale and economy. Bought Radisson Americas in 2022. |
| 3 | Marriott International | ~5,600 | Roughly 30 flags from Ritz-Carlton down to Fairfield. Marriott manages a small slice and owns almost none. The franchisee is the buyer. |
| 4 | Hilton Worldwide | ~5,500 | Hampton, Hilton Garden Inn, Home2 Suites, DoubleTree, Embassy. Heavily franchised. Hilton corporate stopped owning real estate at any meaningful scale years ago. |
| 5 | IHG Hotels and Resorts | ~4,400 | Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Staybridge, Candlewood, Crowne Plaza. Predominantly franchised, particularly in select-service. |
| 6 | Best Western | ~1,900 | Membership association rather than a franchisor. Each property is independently owned and operated, which is exactly how it sounds when you call. |
| 7 | Hyatt Hotels Corporation | ~700 | Smaller footprint, premium-skewed. Hyatt Place and Hyatt House grew select-service; the Apple Leisure Group deal added all-inclusive resorts. |
| 8 | G6 Hospitality | ~1,400 | Motel 6 and Studio 6. Acquired by Oyo in 2024. Almost entirely franchised across the budget segment along the interstate corridors. |
| 9 | Sonesta International Hotels | ~1,100 | Grew rapidly after absorbing the Red Lion Hotels and a slice of the IHG portfolio. Mixed managed and franchised. |
| 10 | Extended Stay America | ~700 | Single-brand operator in extended-stay, taken private by Blackstone and Starwood Capital. One of the few major US players that still owns most of its real estate. |
Counts marked "~" are approximate, drawn from each operator's most recent annual report and cross-referenced with our property map. Order is by US property count, not global. Marriott, Hilton, and IHG are larger by rooms than property count alone suggests, because their portfolios skew toward 200-plus-room upscale and full-service properties. The buyer for your software or program is the franchisee or third-party operator on the contract, not the parent.
Our take
The Marriott logo on the porte cochere is mostly a licence.
We believe
If you sell into hotels and you only target the brand HQ in Bethesda or McLean, you are walking past 80,000 buyers.
The standard vendor motion in hospitality is to chase the flag. Land Marriott on a master agreement, land Hilton, land IHG. We have watched a PMS team work that motion for three years, then look at the math: even if you stack Wyndham, Choice, Marriott, Hilton, and IHG together, that is roughly 27,700 properties out of 91,797. The remaining two-thirds, somewhere over 60,000 hotels, sits with independents, soft brands, and franchisees whose corporate signage was never the contracting entity.
One of those franchisees called us last quarter. She owns four Holiday Inn Express properties across central Tennessee, with a fifth Hampton Inn under construction. Her PMS vendor had not picked up the phone in two years, her revenue-management contract was on autorenewal, and her last channel-manager pitch came from a rep who thought IHG corporate was the customer. The contract sits with the LLC she signed with her brother. That is the market most vendors miss, not because the owners are hiding, but because the data tools are searching for "IHG" instead of for the ownership group that signs the AP run.
Who buys this data
Vendors selling into 91,797 US hotels.
This page is for the teams selling into hotels, not the operators themselves. The buyer for this dataset usually falls into one of these categories.
Hotel PMS and property-management software
Cloudbeds, Mews, Opera, RoomKeyPMS, and the next wave of cloud PMS vendors selling the upgrade off a legacy on-prem stack. The buyer is the franchisee, not the flag.
Revenue management and dynamic pricing
IDeaS, Duetto, Atomize, and the in-house analytics teams selling revenue optimization. The decision sits with the asset manager and the ownership group, not the brand revenue desk.
OTA channel managers and direct booking
SiteMinder, Cloudbeds Distribution, Travelclick, and the direct-booking tools fighting Booking.com and Expedia for every reservation. The conversation is with the owner watching net ADR.
F and B supply and amenity vendors
US Foods, Sysco, Standard Textile, Guest Supply route reps. Toiletry, linen, and minibar programs whose pricing rounds get decided property by property, not at HQ.
Loyalty, CRM, and payments
Cendyn, Revinate, Adyen for Hospitality, Shift4, folio-integrated payment processors. Loyalty bolt-ons that supplement the brand program for direct-booked guests.
In-room tech, locks, and housekeeping
Assa Abloy, Salto, Dormakaba lock vendors. Sonifi and Enseo TV systems. Optii, Hotelkit, and the housekeeping-ops platforms replacing clipboard schedules. The owner signs the capex.
Adjacent universes built the same way: the largest hotel chains in the US, the broader by-industry email lists, and the full data hub.
Plain-spoken
When the hotel dataset is the wrong fit.
Do not buy this if any of the following are true.
You only sell into the majors. If your motion is one master agreement with Marriott corporate and one with Hilton corporate, you do not need 91,797 records. You need two account executives in Bethesda and McLean. Save your budget.
You need real-time RevPAR and occupancy benchmarks. STR owns that surface, and CoStar before them. Kalibri Labs and HotStats publish the comp-set analytics. We map the properties and the owners, not the daily ADR by submarket.
Your product is for travelers. Trip planners, OTA consumer tools, loyalty-aggregation apps for end users: the data here is operator-side, not guest-side. Different shape, different licence.
You need short-term rental and vacation home inventory. Airbnb, VRBO, and the STR-tracking tools like AirDNA cover that universe. The hotel dataset is hotels and motels, scoped out of vacation rentals on purpose.
The honest version
Why most hotel vendor data is wrong.
If you Google "how many hotels in the US," the answers cluster around 91,797 properties and roughly 5.8 million guest rooms, both from the AHLA 2024 State of the Industry. Those are the right numbers, and we use them as our anchor. What the published reports do not give you is the row beneath the row: which LLC owns the property, who the asset manager is, and whether the GM listed on the website still works there. That gap is the whole story for an outbound team.
The next problem is the brand. Enterprise data tools index by company, so "Marriott" looks like one customer with 5,600 US properties. It is not. Marriott franchises the flag. The property is owned by an LLC controlled by a regional ownership group in Atlanta, or by a publicly traded REIT, or by a family office with eleven Hampton Inns and one Aloft. Each is a different buyer, with a different asset manager, on a different operating contract. The big database returns one row. The reality is several thousand.
This is the gap Orbital was built for. We map the universe of US small and mid-market businesses, find the owner of each one, and validate the contact before it reaches you. Nothing about that is hotel-specific, which is why we can also map dentists, HVAC contractors, med spas, restaurants, and gas stations the same way. What is specific to hotels is the layer on top: flag affiliation, segment, room count, ownership group size, and whether the property is brand-managed, owner-operated, or run by a third-party management company like Aimbridge or Highgate.
One more piece of context worth pricing in. AHLA, STR, Skift, and Hotel Management all publish thoughtful annual or quarterly market reports. They are excellent, and we cite them. They are also annual or quarterly, and they intentionally stop at brand and segment summaries because their customers are analysts and capital markets, not outbound reps. For a vendor doing outbound this quarter, the question is which properties are open this Monday and which owner is on the phone. That is the gap a property-by-property, owner-by-owner map closes.
Questions
Before you ask sales about the hotel-owner dataset.
How many hotels are there in the US?
There are 91,797 active hotels in the United States, representing roughly 5.8 million guest rooms, based on the AHLA State of the Industry 2024 report cross-checked against Orbital's property-by-property map. The count includes branded and independent properties across luxury, upscale, midscale, economy, and extended-stay segments.
Who owns the most hotels in the US?
Wyndham Hotels and Resorts has the largest US property footprint at roughly 6,200 hotels, mostly franchised under the Days Inn, Super 8, La Quinta, and Ramada flags. Choice Hotels follows at around 6,000 US properties, then Marriott at 5,600, Hilton at 5,500, and IHG at 4,400. The flag is rarely the owner. Most properties are held by independent franchisees and small ownership groups.
Are most hotels owned by the big brands like Marriott and Hilton?
No. The Marriott, Hilton, IHG, and Wyndham signs on the highway are flags, not ownership. Marriott and Hilton each own well under five percent of the hotels that fly their flag. The property is almost always held by an independent franchisee or a hotel ownership group on a franchise agreement, with day-to-day operations run by a third-party management company. That is the decision-maker most vendors are actually trying to reach.
Which state has the most hotels?
Florida leads with around 5,400 properties, driven by Orlando, Miami, and the coastal markets. California follows at roughly 5,200, Texas at 5,100, New York at 3,600, and Nevada at 1,200 (with Las Vegas alone holding the largest single-market room count in the country). Per capita, vacation-economy states and corridor states with heavy highway lodging punch above their population weight.
How is your count different from AHLA or STR?
AHLA and STR publish excellent industry-wide aggregates: the 91,797 property figure comes from the AHLA 2024 State of the Industry, and STR provides the canonical RevPAR and occupancy benchmarks the whole industry quotes. They publish brand-level and segment-level summaries. They do not publish property-level ownership with named decision-maker contacts, because that is not their job. Orbital builds the universe property by property, resolves each one to a real ownership group, and refreshes monthly so you can prospect off something fresher than an annual report.
Who actually buys hotel data?
Vendors selling into hospitality. Hotel PMS and property-management software vendors. Revenue management and dynamic-pricing platforms. OTA channel managers and direct-booking tools. F and B supply, linen, and amenity vendors. Loyalty and CRM platforms. Payment processors and folio integrators. In-room tech, locks, and TV systems. The common thread is that they need the owner or asset manager, not the corporate brand team.
Can I filter the dataset by state, brand, or segment?
Yes. Filter by state and metro, by flag and parent brand, by segment (luxury through economy and extended-stay), by room count band, and by ownership group size. Most teams start with one or two states and one segment to validate fit before scaling.
Can I get a sample of the hotel owner data?
Yes. Tell us the states or flags you want and we send a sample of around 100 verified owner records so you can check them against your own pipeline before anything changes hands. There is no charge for the sample.
See the hotel owner dataset before you pay for it.
Tell us the states or flags you want. We send a free sample of around 100 verified owner records you can check against your own pipeline, no commitment, no email-list back-and-forth.
Get the sample