Method

Three Verdicts

Every entry on this site ends with one of three words. Return means I would book it again without hesitation. Once means it was worth one stay but I feel no urge to repeat it. Skip means I would not book it again. That is the whole scale.

There are no scores out of ten here, and that is deliberate. A 7.4 tells you almost nothing. Was the bed great and the breakfast a disaster? Did the location rescue an otherwise ordinary room? A number flattens all of that into false precision. The question I actually ask myself on checkout morning is simpler: would I come back? So that is the question I answer. The reasoning lives in the review itself.

Tiers

Each hotel is filed under one of four tiers, and this is a working scale for this site, not an industry standard. Upscale covers select-service and mid-tier full-service brands, think Aloft, Courtyard, and DoubleTree. Upper-Upscale is the full-service flagship territory of Hyatt Regency, Hilton, Westin, Andaz, and today also Conrad and Kimpton. Luxury is a fourth tier held open for properties that sit between those flagships and the true top end, and I expect some entries to move up into it as I reclassify. Ultra-Luxury is reserved for the likes of Park Hyatt, Waldorf Astoria, Ritz-Carlton, and Six Senses.

Tiers are a judgment call. A brand can straddle two of them, and an individual property can land above or below its flag. The tier tells you what the hotel is trying to be. The verdict tells you whether it pulled it off.

Real Stays

Every hotel in the register is one I actually slept in. Not toured on a site inspection, not written up from a press release. Slept in.

The photos are my own phone photos. They are not always pretty, and that is sort of the point. Marketing photography is shot at the perfect hour. Mine show the room as it looked when I walked in.

Entries are numbered in the order they are logged, and they are never renumbered. Number seven will always be number seven, no matter how long the list grows.

The Disclosure

I own Scott & Thomas, a travel agency and a Virtuoso member agency. When a review carries a booking link, that link runs through our booking engine, which opens preferred-partner rates alongside standard options. If a booking is made through one of those links, I earn a commission.

I want to be plain about what that does and does not affect. It does not touch the verdict. A hotel I would skip gets a Skip whether or not there is a link on the page, and a hotel I would return to gets a Return even when I have nothing to sell you. Some entries have no link at all, and those reviews are written exactly the same way. The commission keeps the lights on. The verdict is the whole reason the site exists.