How we score

Hotel ratings bunch together near the top. In most cities a typical hotel is rated between 8 and 9 out of 10, so a rating on its own says little.

We take the rating left by guests who booked and stayed, and work out what share of the other hotels in the same city it beats. That share is half the score.

This is why a simple hotel can outscore a grand one: the score says how well a hotel does what it sets out to do, not how luxurious it is.

We collect a hotel's most recent reviews from each site and read those from the last two years: all of them where there are a few hundred, the newest few hundred where there are thousands. Each hotel page says exactly how many were counted.

Subject by subject, we count how many guests praise and how many complain. The share that is praise goes into the score.

A count on a hotel page opens to guests' own sentences, with their source and date.

A hotel's newest guest photos are checked for damage and dirt. The share that shows none goes into the score.

The same photos are checked against what the hotel advertises, so a pool that guests have photographed is marked as confirmed.

Illness, bed bugs, theft, harassment and physical hazards are counted on their own and shown beside the score. They are not folded into it, because one report matters even when everything else is good.

These are guests' own accounts, taken from their reviews. We have not verified them and the hotel may dispute them. A report is counted only when the guest says it happened at the hotel and holds the hotel responsible, and a review posted on two sites is counted once.

If you run a hotel and a report here is wrong, write to us.

• Strong: 80 or more.
• Good: 65 to 79.
• Mixed: 50 to 64.
• Weak: 35 to 49.
• Poor: under 35.

Software reads each review and each photo and answers fixed yes-or-no questions about it, such as whether the guest complains about noise. Every total, share and rank is then counted from those answers. No person edits a score, and no hotel or booking site can pay to change one.

• Reviews from Google, Tripadvisor and a network of booking sites that only accepts reviews from guests who stayed.
• Photos from the hotel and from guests.
• Open map data for distances.
• Every hotel page shows the date it was last checked. This page was updated 19 September 2026, by the Long Weekend team.

• We do not sell rooms.
• We do not accept payment for placement or for a score.
• We do not write a number by hand. Every figure is counted.