Hotel franchise fees — what the flag actually costs, and what it has to deliver
A hotel brand charges a royalty, a marketing/loyalty fee, and usually a reservation fee — together the "fee stack," commonly in the high-single to low-teens as a percentage of rooms revenue. The question that decides whether a flag is worth it is not the fee rate alone; it is how much RevPAR the flag has to add before that fee stack breaks even, and that threshold is not the mirror image of what it takes to walk away from a flag you already have.
Franchise fees bundle a royalty on rooms revenue, a marketing/loyalty-program fee, and a central reservation fee — most full-service and select-service brands land the combined stack somewhere in the 8–13% range, on top of the property-improvement plan (PIP) required at change of brand.
On a worked inn, the flag has to lift RevPAR 19.8% — from $121.78 to $145.89 — before an 11.9% fee stack pays for itself against the unbranded baseline. Dropping a flag already carried is a different threshold entirely: the same property is only worth de-flagging if RevPAR would fall by less than 16.5% without the brand's demand.
Those two numbers are not opposite sides of one line — taking a flag and dropping one are asymmetric decisions with different break-even math, because the demand a brand adds and the demand it would cost you to lose are not the same demand. Run both directions before signing either way, using your own comp set's RevPAR, not the franchise disclosure document's.