Luxury Hotel Reviews exists because most writing about luxury hotels is advertising with a byline. Scores appear without criteria, superlatives arrive without evidence, and the reader is left guessing whether a £2,000 suite is worth a tenth of it. We thought travellers deserved better, so in 2019 we started reviewing hotels the way serious critics review restaurants.
What we do
We visit the hotels we review. Our editors sleep in the rooms, eat the breakfasts, test the spa tables, time the room service and check whether the concierge actually knows the city. Every review is written from notes taken on the property, not from a press release, and every one carries a score out of ten that we are prepared to defend. We publish detailed reviews across five continents, from Venetian palazzos to overwater villas in the Maldives, and the collection grows every month.
Independence, in practice
We pay our own way wherever possible. When a hotel hosts a stay, the review says so at the top of the page and the scoring standard does not move. No hotel can buy a review, improve a score or remove a criticism, and no commercial partner sees a review before you do. Some links on this site are affiliate links: if you book through them we may earn a commission at no cost to you. That income keeps the site free and the reviews unbought. Which hotels we review, and what we say about them, is decided by editors alone.
How we score
Every property is assessed against the same 200-point inspection covering arrival, rooms, food and drink, service, wellness, design and value. The result is a single score out of ten, published with the reasoning that produced it. A 7 from us is a genuinely good hotel. A 9 is special. We have never given a 10, and we hope one day a hotel makes us. The full method is set out on our How We Review page.
Who we are
We are a small editorial team based in London, with contributing editors in Asia and the Americas: former hotel inspectors, food writers and one recovering hotelier. You can read about the people behind the scores on Our Reviewers, and reach the desk any time via our contact page. If you have stayed somewhere that deserves our attention, or somewhere that fell far short of its rate card, tell us. Reader tips start more reviews than press releases ever have.