How We Research
Most hotel roundups are written by someone who went once, or by someone who went nowhere and hoped you wouldn’t ask. We’re the second kind, and we’d rather tell you exactly what that means.
The short version
We have not stayed in the hotels we write about. Every post here is built from data and from other people’s reviews, not from our own nights in the room. Nothing on this site will ever claim otherwise.
That rules out one thing — the personal anecdote — and leaves three we take seriously.
| What we can’t offer | What we do instead |
|---|---|
| "The bed was firm and the coffee was excellent" | "Firm mattresses come up in review after review — and that’s a complaint about half the time" |
| A photo from our own window | Coordinates, distances and ratings you can check yourself |
| A memory from a trip in 2019 | Data pulled this month, with the date on the page |
Where our facts come from
We rank sources, and the ranking decides what wins when two sources disagree.
- Official sources — the hotel’s own site, transit operators, tourism boards, government pages. Prices, opening hours, fees and rules come from here or they don’t get published.
- Map and location data — coordinates, distances and ratings from Google Places.
- Major booking platforms — Agoda, Booking.com, Trip.com.
- Review platforms — Google reviews, TripAdvisor and equivalents.
- Established travel media.
- Personal blogs and forums — used for leads, never as the only source for a fact.
Facts that matter get cross-checked against two independent sources: distance to the station, airport access, check-in times, breakfast inclusion, pool and gym availability, child policies, room size, renovations, closures, and prices.
What happens to a fact we can’t confirm
It doesn’t go in the post.
We don’t estimate, we don’t round up from a single blog, and we don’t fill a gap with a plausible-sounding sentence. If a hotel’s rate isn’t available from a source we trust, the post says we don’t have it rather than guessing. You’ll see that on the page occasionally, and it’s deliberate.
How we read reviews
Individual reviews are noisy. Someone had a bad flight and took it out on the front desk; someone got upgraded and rated the wallpaper five stars. A single review tells you almost nothing.
Patterns tell you a lot. So we look for a theme repeated by at least three independent reviewers before it goes in a post, we weight recent reviews over old ones, and we read the negative ones first.
Every post names at least one drawback for every place we recommend. Not as a formality — a real, specific complaint that came up more than once. If we couldn’t find one, that usually means we haven’t read enough reviews yet.
We don’t quote reviews at length or reproduce them. We summarise the pattern in our own words.
Distances and walking times
When we say a hotel is a four-minute walk, here’s what that means.
We take the hotel’s coordinates and the station’s, measure the distance, and convert at 80 metres per minute. Where a measurement is straight-line rather than a routed walking path, the post says so — real routes run slightly longer once you add stairs and crossings.
Hotels that fail the distance claim in the title get cut from the list, even popular ones. When that happens we name them and show the number, because "why isn’t X on this list" is a fair question.
Freshness
Every post carries a Last verified date. That date is when we last checked the facts, not when we last touched a comma.
Data goes stale at different speeds, so we re-check on different cycles: prices fastest, then opening hours and ratings, then addresses and amenities. If something material changed since the last version — a fee went up, a hotel closed for renovation — we say so in the post, because that’s the part a two-year-old article can’t tell you.
What we don’t do
- We don’t invent first-hand experience.
- We don’t publish a price, distance or time we couldn’t source.
- We don’t accept payment for coverage, placement or a better ranking.
- We don’t publish sponsored or guest posts.
- We don’t rank by commission rate.
- We don’t recommend a place we can’t give a specific reason for.
- We don’t use photography we don’t have the rights to, and we never present a stock or area photo as if it were the property.
Corrections
We get things wrong. When we do, we want to know quickly.
Use the contact form with the post title and the problem. Corrections take priority over new work. When we fix something material we update the post and change the verification date, so you can see it was rechecked.
If you’ve stayed at a property we’ve covered and our summary of the reviews doesn’t match what you found, that’s useful too — it’s often the first sign a hotel has changed hands or finished a renovation.
Why we work this way
Because it’s the honest version of what this site can do, and because it produces something the anecdote can’t: numbers you can check, updated recently, with the reasoning shown.
If you’d rather read someone’s travel diary, there are excellent ones. This isn’t that.