Also .hotel and .hotels. And .photo and .photos (and .photography). Plus .ink and .inc. And many more "confusingly similar" despite ICANN rules that were supposed to prevent that. Money talks.
I agree there's serious potential for misleading customers, but also see the occasional merit of having both, ie, if you own Hank's Hotel you'd want the .hotel tld to correctly identify your business, and likewise helpmefind.hotels makes more sense than helpmefind.hotel. These are my arbitrary examples that do not outweigh the potential for the fraud of someone registering hanks.hotels maliciously. I think icann is a horrible entity and never should have existed.
On a different note, I like how many tlds there are now. .pizza is my personal favorite.
Did you mean: .hoteles and .hotels? (.hotel was not there as of 2020-09-11T07:10Z)
Amazingly enough, they seemingly had enough intelligence to determine that .hotels and .hoteis (Portuguese for ".hotels") are similar enough and warrant the exclusitivity [1], but not for .hotels and .hoteles. At the least .hotels is not yet delegated but merely proposed and only passed the initial evaluation, though.
Why have both? There is no way that isn't going to cause confusion.