While affiliation may provide operational benefits to hotels, the extant research is inconclusive. We suggest that this is because affiliation in and of itself does not generate the greater guest satisfaction on which operating performance largely depends. According to both Agency Theory and the Resource Based Theory of the firm, management structure should matter. We thus examine the impact of chain, owner and third-party operations on guest satisfaction in 499 hotels in the United States. In line with both theories, we find that chain-managed hotels outperform the others in upper-end, full-service hotels, but underperform in lower-end, limited-service hotels. As such, our findings suggest that RBT provides a stronger explanation for the performance differences than AT as the greater resources of chains were not necessary in lower-end hotels while agency problems should not be chain-scale dependent and thus AT does not explain the disparate results across scales.