Is there any difference between a hotel and a motel?

Other than one is more expensive but which one is better? Please clear this annoying question up for me, once and for all!

thanks!

In my experience, motels are generally one story and have seperate rooms with doors leading outside. Hotels are more of a multi-story building that contains the rooms with their doorways leading to the hallway.

There is one basic difference that Wikipedia lists, but I'm sure you'll find more there:

"Hotels differ from motels in that most motels have drive-up, exterior entrances to the rooms, while hotels tend to have interior entrances to the rooms, which may increase guests' safety and present a more upmarket image."

Check out the article linked for more info.

An easy way to remember this is that hotel is the French cognate of hostel, whereas motel derives from 'motor hotel,' and thus is going to be more accessible from a roadway and (very likely) less city-oriented.

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Hotel can defiantly be better but there are some hotels that actually look like motels. Motels tend to be dirtier and run down.

motel is a kind of small hotel that is usually on the roads, so that drivers who are for example traveling all night can have somewhere to rest in, but a hotel is usually bigger, more expensive, with more equipments and can be anywhere, in the city or along the beach.