Booking a suite produces wildly different results depending on the property. The names attached to room categories are internal marketing labels rather than defined standards.
The words carry no industry definition
Terms such as deluxe, executive, premier and junior suite are not governed by any external standard, and each hotel is free to apply them as it wishes.
Within a single property the hierarchy is real and consistent, since categories exist to price rooms against each other in a coherent order.
Between properties the same word carries no transferable meaning, which is why comparing categories across hotels produces unreliable conclusions.
Categories are created to fill price gaps
A hotel with a wide range between its cheapest and most expensive room needs intermediate steps, because a large jump loses the guests in the middle.
New categories are therefore invented to sit between existing ones, distinguished by a view, a higher floor, a larger bathroom or access to a lounge.
The physical difference is sometimes small, but the pricing function is genuine: it captures guests who would pay more than the base rate but not the top one.
Historic buildings force irregular categories
In converted buildings the rooms are genuinely different from one another, with varying sizes, ceiling heights and window arrangements that cannot be standardised.
Grouping them into categories is an approximation, and two rooms sold at the same rate may differ noticeably in size or outlook.
This is why such hotels often describe individual rooms rather than categories, and why room-specific requests carry more weight there than a category upgrade would.
The word suite is the least reliable of all
In its strict sense a suite has a separate living space, but the term is regularly applied to a single large room with a partial divider or a seating area.
A junior suite in particular is usually one room, and the qualifier is doing the work of signalling that no separating door exists.
Reading the floor area and the room description matters far more than the category name, since the area is a number the hotel cannot stretch.
How to book against the confusion
Floor area, bed configuration and what the windows face are the three attributes that determine how a room feels, and all three are usually stated.
Photographs on the property's own site tend to show the best example of a category, so recent guest photographs are a useful corrective.
Where a specific attribute matters, requesting it explicitly at booking is more effective than paying for a higher category and hoping it is included.