When is a suite really a suite? The lingo of lodging

How suite it is. Or isn’t.

My Webster’s New World College Dictionary couldn’t be clearer: A suite is “a group of connected rooms used as a unit, such as an apartment.”

But check in to a suite at some hotels, and you’ll find yourself in one room. A bigger room, perhaps, or one with a sitting area, fireplace or whirlpool. But you’ll still be staring at a single set of walls.

There are many other terms, such as “spa,” “continental breakfast” and “fitness facility,” that may mean one thing in the real world and another thing, or several things, in lodging lingo. Nail down the definition before you book, or risk disappointment.

Terms such as “ocean view” and “ocean front” are so ill-defined, some experts say, that you’re wise to cast them aside and just tell the hotel what you’re looking for.

“If you want to look out upon the ocean and see the beach, the bathers and dogs catching Frisbees, describe what you want,” said Paul Ruden, senior vice president for industry and legal affairs at the American Society of Travel Agents in Alexandria, Va.

It’s a good idea, he added, to put your preferences in an e-mail to the hotel or your travel agent. Otherwise you might find yourself dashing across a busy highway to get to the beach or squinting at a sliver of an ocean view between tall buildings.

Ditto for suites. If you want two rooms with a door between them, say so. Even within the same chain, there may be little consensus on what a suite is.

When I called the Best Western Capitola By-the-Sea Inn & Suites near Santa Cruz, the reservations clerk offered me what she said was considered a suite.

“It’s the same space as a standard room, but it has a whirlpool bath,” she explained. “There’s no separation.”

The hotel also had “mini-suites,” with a partition that extended partway across the room, and “extended mini-suites,” with a door between the bedroom and sleeping area.

Forty miles away, in Redwood City, the Best Western Executive Suites offered one- and two-room suites.

“We consider it a suite because it has a sitting area,” the reservations clerk said of the single-room version, which lacked a dividing wall. Two-room suites had doors between sitting and sleeping areas.

Mark Williams, vice president of North American development for Best Western International in Phoenix, said the chain had many types of suites, some with two rooms, some with one.

“It has to have some kind of separation,” he said, such as a half-wall, a full wall or a bathroom between sitting and sleeping areas.

Which one it is may make a big difference if, for instance, your suite mate snores or watches late-night TV.

When I asked Williams whether labeling a single room a suite is deceptive, he replied: “To an extent it would be, if you call it a full suite.” Such are the subtleties.

Other hotels may offer a “junior suite.” Dick Penner, a professor at Cornell Hotel School’s Center for Hospitality Research in Ithaca, N.Y., defined this as “a larger room than a standard hotel room.”

Shane O’Flaherty, who oversees hotel inspections and star ratings at Mobil Travel Guide, sided with the dictionary. Suites, he said, are “guest accommodations that consist of two rooms: a separate bedroom and a living room with a dividing door.”

Michael Petrone, director of tourism information development at AAA, said his group defines a suite as “a guest unit with distinctly separate rooms, a living room or sitting area and one or more bedrooms defined by four walls and an entry.”

None of which matters if your hotel defines it otherwise.

The same can be said for “continental breakfast.”

Webster’s defines it as “a light breakfast, usually of rolls and coffee or tea.” Petrone and O’Flaherty would add juice to the mix, and O’Flaherty said he’d expect breads, muffins, pastries and cereal.

At one New Orleans guesthouse I stayed in, continental meant instant coffee and a muffin. A Florida hotel once surprised me with a lavish platter piled with tropical fruit. Some continental buffets in my travels have been groaning boards.

Fitness facility can also mean nearly anything.

“You’ve got to grill the concierge,” said Suzanne Schlosberg, author of “Fitness for Travelers: The Ultimate Workout Guide for the Road.”

Are there free weights? Machines? How many? Which brands?

At the Affinia Dumont in New York, which bills itself as an “executive fitness suite hotel,” Schlosberg found “fantastic equipment,” including a yoga room and dumbbells of every weight. But at a chain hotel in suburban Chicago, she quickly abandoned a recumbent bike that was so uncomfortable, “I felt like I was in a wood chair.” The only other equipment, a treadmill, was occupied.

Schlosberg said she found a lot of “schlocky equipment” at hotels on her book tours.

“There’s a lot of misrepresentation” in the lodging industry, Mobil’s O’Flaherty said. “Like they say they have a spa, and it’s one treatment room.”

The word “suite,” the AAA’s Petrone said, “has become almost meaningless throughout the industry as some brands have stretched the limits of truth in marketing.”

But because words such as spa and luxury are so vague and are part of promotional literature, the consumer may have little legal ground to dispute them.

“All of these things are a form of advertising,” ASTA’s Ruden said. “You are entitled to engage in what may be called ‘puffery.’ ”

Like it or not, terms such as suite and fitness facility are destined to lead double lives: one tethered to the workaday world and another floating in the ether of advertising.

Given that, it’s best to avoid trouble by asking specific questions when you book the room -- not after you put the key in the door.

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Hear more tips from Jane Engle on Travel Insider topics at latimes.com/engle. She welcomes comments but can’t respond individually to letters and calls. Write to Travel Insider, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., L.A., CA 90012, or e-mail jane.engle@latimes.com.