If I owned a hotel the things @Holly Saunders mentioned would be my priorities, for myself a bath tub is not necessary, I only have a bath once a decade at most, ...... I am a daily shower person, so a wet room would be preferable, but you only really get those in Asian countries. I have never favoured chain hotels because they are soulless and impersonal to me, and for many years now I tend to use Homestays where you have a private room or studio in a family house, that way you get home cooking and a chance to chat with local people and a very low price. I look for a larger than average room and a soft bed plus a desk and of course the essential WiFi these days...
All I really look for is my money's worth. The higher the price, the higher my expectations. It's kind of a Biblical concept really: to whom much is given, much is expected. It might sound like comparing apples to oranges but the Mandarin Hotel in Taiwan gave me the barometer by which I judge a hotel, the amenities, and of course, the room. With the military discount I only spent around a hundred bucks American for 5 days for something that would make people staying at the Hyatt or Hiltons of the U.S. salivate over. Speaking of the Hilton, when I got back to the lower 48 after 3 1/2 months in a processing town in Alaska, I stayed at one in Salt Lake City. At $146 a day, the management found me a bit of a pain because I changed rooms three times in the first hour of my stay. The first room had a very visible tear in the drapes, and the second had a large stain in the carpet. I would have almost expected such things at a no tell motel, but not for anything that costs more than 100 beans a day. Heck, I once complained to management when a room service waiter delivered a nearly $150 order wearing black jeans and tennis shoes.
Ha ha @Bobby Cole, you sound like my daughter. It's a given she's going to change rooms. There's always something wrong with the first room she gets...usually her view which isn't what she was promised, then construction outside her room...always something. If you travel with her, don't unpack right away.
I like rooms that come with a large bathtub. In order to gain more room in our very small bathroom at home, we exchanged the tub for a shower, so it's nice to be able to have a bath once in a while. As for costs versus quality, the worst I have ever had was a very large hotel in downtown Boston. We were in Boston for a search engine optimization conference, and chose a room in the same hotel, for convenience, and because it was across the street from the Commons, and not far from the cemetery where all the famous people are buried. It was way more expensive than what we usually do, at nearly $300 a day. We had booked our room well in advance of the conference. It was a very small room, and it looked shoddy. Some may call it quaint but I felt that shoddy was a better description. The television literally didn't work, by which I don't mean there were some problems with it, but that there was no picture. It was June and it was hot, at least for us, coming from Maine, and the air conditioning didn't work. When we called to complain about the television and the air conditioner, they brought a tiny little TV that they had probably been using in their lunch room, and a fan. When we called, they told us that they don't turn the air conditioning on until July. That first night was miserable. After the first day of conference activities, we went with a friend to his room, for which he was actually paying less than we were, and found that, not only was it much larger, but he had air conditioning. We were furious. Rather than calling, we went down to the front desk to ask why they had lied to us about the air conditioning, and to demand a different room. This time, the manager told us that only the first two floor were air conditioned, but that they don't turn the air conditioning on in the top floors until July, since "most people" find that the breeze through the windows keeps them plenty cool on the upper floors. We didn't leave until we got another room, and one on whatever floor we needed to be on in order to have air conditioning. We did get a larger room, with air conditioning and a working television of a normal size, but the room was still rather shabby and not even worth a hundred dollars a night. Then we both wrote separate bad reviews on Trip Advisor. The most interesting room I have ever had was when I was in my teens, and hitchhiking to California. I don't even know where it was on a map, but the last town I was aware of had been Flagstaff, Arizona. There was no traffic and it was very cold outside. I walked up to a motel. I couldn't tell for sure if it was actually open or not because there were very few lights, but there was a light on in the office area. The outside door was locked but there was a bell, so I pressed it. After a long time, someone came who had obviously just gotten out of bed. I asked if he had a room, and she said she had rooms but she didn't know how comfortable they would be because the heat wasn't working. They were renovating the motel but she'd rent me a room since there were no other options nearby. Sure enough. At one point, I had to walk across a piece of plywood that was covering a hole in the floor in the hallway, and there were the dimmest of lights on in the hallway, not any more than you might expect from a nightlight. She brought me an electric blanket because, sure enough, there was no heat. But she charged me something like five or six dollars, and it was better than being outside. The next morning, I found that they did have an attached restaurant that was open, and the food was very good and also inexpensive.
Since we usually stay in Choice Hotels, I don't often stay in hotels that have smoking rooms but there are very few chain hotels in northern Maine, and the independent hotels and motels cater to hunters, snowmobilers, and the like, so they usually have designated smoking rooms. We stayed at one of our favorite motels in Caribou, Maine for a night last summer, and all they had left was a smoking room, and it was absolutely disgusting. The store didn't carry enough Febreze to fix that one.