I am building a custom vacation subhood, and the hotels built in that hood are not working correctly.
I should be able to put those builds into another neighbourhood for testing. As community lots, this works. As lodgings, it does not.

Placed into a primary hood, sims can't use the hotel lots - as soon as they arrive, the game sends them home again in the shuttle. (See picture.)

Placed into Twikkii, my two hotels were non-functional - no concierge, and sims could enter any of the suites. The lots were not listed in the neighbourhood screen as available lodgings. I was able to repair this by placing fresh community versions and rezoning them - one had to be done twice, but thereafter, sims could stay in them as usual.

Saving the functional version from Twikkii, and putting that into a primary hood did not work - the hotels were immediately broken again in the same way.

I have confirmed that a hotel built in Twikki and placed into a normal hood works as expected. Also, a hotel built in a normal hood and transferred to another for testing is fine.

I tried rezoning the lots back and forth between community and hotel, and placing new copies. I removed everything from Downloads and deleted cache files. This is a test environment, with nothing in Saved Sims.

It seems that the hotels built in this fake subhood are somehow broken. The campground is fine, so I suspect it is something about the concierge that gets borked.

I am using Moo's method here: https://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=420196 - the manual method (since the AnyGameStarter didn't play nice with my UC). I haven't noticed any other problems. I have made a couple of other custom subhoods previously, though I used the AGS those times.

Suggestions, anyone? I suppose I can rebuild the lots in a different hood if I have to, but they are complex, so I'm really hoping there's a better answer.

I don't know if I have a better answer but I took a good look at this today, I ran my game in M&G because A&N has a re-written hotel controller but I did not encounter the problem you are having. I placed Maxis BV Grand Hotel in a primary neighbourhood, entered in buy/build and changed the colour of the rubbish bin and saved just in-case saving in a primary 'hood makes any difference. I was able to send a family there, claim a room, book them in with no problem at all. Although it was probably because of the time in the morning I sent them there even a housekeeper spawned.

The thing that sends sims home and contains the 'We hope your vacation was everything you expected it to be. The airport shuttle should be arriving as soon as possible to take you back.' message is the Vacation Transport Controller (Controller - Vacation Transport). It loads as a controller on every lot but should self delete after three ticks if the neighbourhood is not a holiday neighbourhood so it should not do that. If the neighbourhood is a holiday neighbourhood it will run 'Function - Main - Sub - Process On Vacation' which is a loop so if it gets there it will continue until it has sent your sims home. Three ticks is not very long and lots can run that much on loading/saving, which is why sometimes bellhops will spawn in buy/build mode. So it could be that on your saved lots the Vacation Transport Controller is stuck in that loop, the only thing I could suggest you do is try the CJH_LotCleaner.zip.

Thanks, Chris, I will give that a go.

EDIT: that seems to work!
Hotel 1 is now stayable in the primary hood.
Do I understand correctly, the controller is getting stuck while the lot loads? Is the problem likely to stay fixed after using the LotCleaner? I hope to share the hood eventually, so it will be a drag if the hotels need repeat fixing.

I suppose I can apply the LotCleaner to the original subhood lots and then try them again in the primary hood. Thank you!

I checked that I can use the LotCleaner on the original lots in their fake subhood, then transfer to another hood without breaking them. I think this is solved.

Yes the problem will stay fixed, the Lot Cleaner was originally written for preparing neighbourhoods for upload.