i did check the history of the page. That single user is a member of the DWG, so i was inclined to believe it was valid. Also the wiki page for tourism=hotel has had this way of mapping for several years, so it looked like Fizzie was matching that wiki page, which made sense to me.

Also I checked overpass, and found that 16% of tourism=motel ways did not have a building tag, which I thought was a large enough percentage to count as a valid way of mapping.

Also from a pragmatic standpoint, I do stand by my initial comment about a multipolygon being a subpar way to map it (losing the distinction between motel building and motel office, inability to add refining tags like building:levels, building:color, etc). I don't know of another correct way to map this.