If doing a USA road trip, what are the pros and cons of staying at Motels vs B and B's?

If doing a USA road trip, what are the pros and cons of staying at Motels vs B and B's?

If you mean traditional B&B’s, there are cons that would be a deal-breaker for me. Many or most have fairly limited check-in hours, and if you can’t make it in those hours, you’re interrupting the often very limited private/non-working time the proprietor may have.

Other cons: Good B&B’s tend to book up far in advance with not much flexibility. This is terrible for road-tripping, and can be outright dangerous if you try to force yourself to drive when overtired or through bad weather, simply to avoid losing a reservation/deposit. They also vastly ratchet up the planning time and effort required.

The pros of course, include a good solid breakfast, personalized surroundings, vastly increased opportunities for meeting interesting people and making connections with the area you’re visiting. Also, generally, much nice surroundings. Finally, you can escape the over-corporatized sameness of so much of American culture, of which hotels/motels are one of the more appallingly dreary examples.

Motels are more available and require almost no planning. When I’m going to stay in a motel or hotel, I tend to check Hotwire a time or three and get something that’s a good deal. I rarely stay in anything under three stars with good recommendations, and I often stay at really nice hotels for the cost of a motel.

Pros? Generally, one can check in anytime without inconveniencing a proprietor or getting someone out of bed. Spontaneous changes in plan are less costly. They’re generally cheaper. Cons? Boring, boring, and boring. You can wake up in the morning and have no idea if you’re in Boston or Tulsa or Minneapolis, which kind of defeats the purpose of road-tripping, doesn’t it?

I feel compelled to add another option to the mix: AirBnB. As a good lefty, I probably oughtn’t mention it at all. Their model is problematic in various ways. That said, the lower-end ABnB’s which are spare rooms or apartments within a person’s home can afford some of the benefits of a BnB—the opportunity to meet locals, the escape from stultifying sameness—with greater convenience and at lower cost than traditional BnBs.

Personally, if I weren’t a camping person, I’d probably mix motels/hotels and B&Bs, reserving B&Bs for specific destinations, for which I had a few fixed dates and plans, and keep things more fluid in between, relying on last-minute booking apps to find something at a convenient location without wedding my wallet to a particular time-frame for every single day of my trip.