Readers keep asking why our scores sit lower than the averages on the big booking sites. The short answer is that we are not grading on the same curve. The long answer is a 200-point inspection sheet, refined over eight years, that every hotel on this site has been marked against. This is how it works.
Who does the inspecting
Our inspectors come from two trades: hotel operations and travel journalism. Each has at least a decade in one of them, which matters because the two backgrounds catch different failures. The ex-hoteliers notice when the minibar audit is faked and the turndown is skipped on the second night; the journalists notice when a hotel is boring, which no checklist measures. Every property is inspected by one person and the write-up is challenged by a second who has usually stayed at the same hotel in a different season. Nobody reviews a hotel where they know the management.
We book like you do
Every review starts with a normal booking under a name the hotel does not know. We stay at least two nights, because the first night of any stay is theatre and the second is the truth. We eat breakfast twice, order room service once, book a treatment if there is a spa, and log every interaction from the booking email to the folio at checkout. We pay our own bill before we reveal ourselves, if we reveal ourselves at all.
The 200 points, in plain terms
The sheet breaks into seven weighted sections. Rooms carry 50 points: acoustics, blackout, water pressure, bedside charging, whether the lighting can be worked out without an engineering degree. Service carries 40, and we score responsiveness, not grovelling; a good hotel answers the phone in three rings at 2am. Food and drink take 35, location and setting 25, design 20, wellness 15, and the final 15 cover what we call honesty: does the hotel deliver what its own website promises?
Some of the points sound trivial until you have travelled enough to know better. We time how long a poached egg takes to reach the table, because breakfast is the one meal almost every guest eats and the kitchen knows it can coast. We run the shower while the extractor fan is on and listen from the bed. We ask one deliberately awkward question at the desk, something the front office cannot answer from a script, and score what happens next. Luxury is not the marble; it is what the hotel does when the script runs out.
How the score is built
Points convert to the 0 to 10 rating you see on every review, to one decimal place. Nothing is rounded up. A 7 from us is a good hotel we would happily return to; an 8 is excellent; anything above 9 means an inspector fought to keep the score down and failed. Two properties have shown how hard the top of the scale is to reach this year: Mandarin Oriental Taipei earned its mark on service consistency, while The Dorian London got there on character that cannot be bought in.
What we will not do
We do not accept payment for reviews, we do not let hotels preview copy, and we do not delete a review because a general manager is unhappy. Scores are corrected only for errors of fact. When a hotel renovates substantially, we go back and re-inspect rather than quietly edit the old piece.
When hotels host us
Occasionally a stay is hosted, usually at openings where paid inventory does not yet exist. Those reviews carry a disclosure line at the top, the same sheet is used, and the inspector who accepts the stay is never the one who writes the score. If that policy costs us access, we consider it money well lost.
The sheet keeps evolving. Points for fax machines died years ago; points for in-room air quality arrived in 2024. What does not change is the premise: a luxury hotel is a promise, and someone should be checking whether it is kept.
