I was very surprised to discover that there are some hotels in America that refuse to provide accommodation for "locals", to which their verbiage reads something like: "No Local rentals, any guest checking in with a ID within a radius of 30 miles from the property will not be able to check in." In general, a policy like this smells distinctly like another form of discrimination but under the color of, an arbitrary callout, of "no locals".
To begin with, hotels in general are always going to get a certain percentage of business from locals, for a variety of reasons, some perhaps eminently justified such as needing a room to accommodate unexpected guests, defective plumbing or other issues within their current residence making it uninhabitable, or a prudent break from a spouse to escape from an escalating argument; as well as fairly obvious reasons such as a rendezvous with someone for pleasure, or a meeting with someone about business that rests outside the law, or for general partying. In all of these above cases, people are going to want to rent at a local hotel because it is convenient for them, which means, that any hotel refusing business to locals, are most definitely turning down business.
From a hotel perspective the reason why a hotel would have a policy of not renting to locals, probably comes down to two basic reasons: the first is that their experience has been that locals have utilized their hotel in a manner that causes inconvenience or headache to management such as noise, unwelcomed visitors, and general partying; the second reason would be that the hotel prefers to rent to tourists because tourists spend more money and are in general, easier to deal with. Still even taking into account that there might be legitimate reasons for a hotel to want to promote their brand exclusively to non-locals, in general, the more people that you draw upon to stay at your hotel, the higher pricing you will often get, because higher occupancy typically means higher hotel rates.
The real reason though that certain hotels refuse local business, is, no matter how they package it, to be discriminatory, to which the first step, is to paint with a very broad brush stroke, and gave yourself the power to refuse everyone within your community, and then within that power, allow exceptions. This then follows the path of the old discrimination to which the target, whether they are of the wrong race, creed, age, or whatever, is denied admittance because that is the company policy, to which you as the hotel proprietor simply shrug your shoulders, and state, that is just the way that it is. The thing is that isn't legal, and no matter how you dress it up, when you make it a policy not to rent to locals, and then proceed to allow in exceptions for those that have the right and appropriate demographic, code words, or excuse, that isn't right.
Now, no doubt, some of these hotels will argue that they really don't rent to any locals, whatsoever, ever. The thing is what is really the point of a policy like that, because if your concern is that locals will run down the place because they are too loud, too destructive, too much this or that, there are plenty of laws on the books that are able to deal with real disturbances; so then rather than judging all guilty for a few bad apples, why not deal honestly with the content of a man's character.