Hotels are similar to petrol stations in that many are independently owned and operated but rely heavily on the brand for marketing.  Coffee shops,  fastfood restaurants and any other franchise-business fall into the same bucket  (starbucks, mcdonalds, home depot, Teleflora).  name, operator, and brand would normally be 3 different things in these cases.
+1 The operator is usually the least apparent, being found only on a plaque somewhere or a business license, and may be the same as the brand, in the case of company-owned stores. Many JOSM presets get this wrong by offering the operator tag for this seldom-known info and not the more commonly-known brand tag, causing people to reverse the two, as does the fuzzy language in the wiki. We settled this a while back - can someone review the JOSM presets?
On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 10:56, Mâ¡rtin Koppenhoefer <dieterdre...@gmail.com> wrote:
- 2010/9/28 Sean Horgan <seanhor...@gmail.com>:
- > sounds good, no objections.
- OK, as this is IMHO no real change, I put it in the wiki.
- Now I realized something else:
- according to the German ML for tagging certain objects 3 tags are useful:
- name, operator, brand
- e.g. a petrol station:
- name would be the _name_ of the specific petrol station
- operator would be the name of the company or person running this
- specific station
- brand would be the name of the chain, e.g. BP, Shell, etc.
- Now looking at the wiki and getting this example:
- Â Â * tourism=hotel
-   * name=Le Méridien Piccadilly (the name of the specific hotel)
-   * operator=Le Méridien (the name of the company that runs the
- hotel, and which maybe run other hotels too)
Knowing nothing else, the operator key should be brand. If one knows that the chain actually manages/operates this hotel itself, the "operator=Le Méridien" tag would be appropriate as well.
Alan Mintz <alan_mintz+...@earthlink.net>
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