Glossary

Chain Scale

Also known as: Chain Scale Segment

The STR-defined classification system grouping hotel brands into tiers — economy, midscale, upper-midscale, upscale, upper-upscale, and luxury — based on their average achieved rate positioning nationally, used to segment competitive analysis and market performance reporting.

Chain scale is assigned at the brand level based on each brand's national average rate relative to all others, not by any individual hotel's own rate, so two hotels of the same brand in different markets share the identical chain-scale classification even if their local rate positioning differs materially — a nuance that matters when using chain-scale data as a proxy for a specific submarket's competitive intensity. Chain scale underpins most market-level trend reports and is a standard axis for supply-pipeline tracking and comp-set construction, since a well-built comp set is expected to draw primarily from within the subject's own chain scale, or the one immediately adjacent, rather than mixing tiers that serve fundamentally different demand segments.