The Chain Gap Index: Hotel Edition
When we published the Chain Gap Index — the longest stretch of interstate where each restaurant chain simply doesn't exist — a reader asked the obvious follow-up: what about hotels? Fair question. You can skip dinner. You can't really skip sleeping. So we ran the exact same query for nine hotel brands people actually plan road trips around.
From the edge of El Paso to the San Antonio city line on I-10, there is not one Hyatt Place at any exit. If your loyalty points live with Hyatt, West Texas does not care.
| Brand | Longest gap | Where | Interstate exits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hyatt Place | 536 mi | I-10, Texas | 436 |
| Comfort Inn | 400 mi | I-10, Texas | 1,831 |
| Super 8 | 359 mi | I-5, California | 2,425 |
| Fairfield Inn | 332 mi | I-90, South Dakota | 1,827 |
| La Quinta | 306 mi | I-5, California | 1,438 |
| Hampton Inn | 280 mi | I-80, Nevada | 2,999 |
| Holiday Inn Express | 271 mi | I-90, South Dakota | 2,906 |
| Motel 6 | 234 mi | I-70, Colorado | 2,314 |
| Best Western | 189 mi | I-94, North Dakota | 2,656 |
As with the restaurant index, each gap is measured between two of the brand's own locations on the same corridor — it's the holes inside each brand's footprint, not the places the brand never went. That's what makes the numbers comparable across brands of very different sizes.
Hampton is the McDonald's of hotels. Best Western is the Subway.
Hampton Inn sits at 2,999 interstate exits — within a rounding error of McDonald's-grade coverage, and its worst gap anywhere is 280 miles of Nevada desert on I-80. But the quiet winner of the whole index is Best Western: you are never more than 189 miles from one on a primary interstate, and even that record gap is just the run between Bismarck and Fargo. For a brand born on Route 66-era roadsides, it turns out the old instinct — be the hotel at the exit, everywhere — never went away.
The premium problem
The index splits cleanly by price point. Hyatt Place appears at just 436 interstate exits — one-seventh of Hampton's count — because upscale select-service brands follow airports, office parks, and downtowns, not ramps. The result: a Hyatt loyalist driving I-10 faces a 536-mile hole, and even on I-15 through Utah the brand goes dark for 276 miles. Meanwhile the mid-scale roadside brands (Comfort Inn, Super 8, Best Western) blanket the map. Loyalty programs are geography, and the geography disagrees about where you're allowed to sleep.
I-90 through South Dakota is the loyalty dead zone
West Texas swallowed eleven of twenty restaurant records, but the hotel index has a second villain: I-90 across South Dakota. Fairfield Inn's national record lives there (332 miles, roughly Rapid City to the far side of the state), Holiday Inn Express's record too (271 miles, Rapid City to Mitchell), and Comfort Inn and Motel 6 both post their runner-up gaps on the same road. Between the Black Hills and Sioux Falls, big-brand loyalty mostly stops working — which is worth knowing before 9 p.m., because the towns out there fill up in tourist season.
And two oddities
Super 8's record isn't in a desert. It's 359 miles of I-5 through California — the same San Joaquin Valley corridor where Sonic posted its 440-mile restaurant gap. I-5 was built to bypass the valley's towns, and the budget-motel brands stayed in the towns on Highway 99. La Quinta's 306-mile record sits on the same road. And Motel 6's worst gap is the entire Colorado Rockies: 234 miles of I-70 from Grand Junction to the Denver foothills, where the mountain resorts in between have long priced out the brand that invented the $6 room.
