About

How Scored Hotels works

Booking sites rate hotels on reviews nobody can audit and rank them by what pays. We rate hotels on what their own websites state, and we show you the sentence for every fact. If you cannot check it, it is not on the page.

Where the hotel list comes from

The list of properties in each city comes from Overture Maps, an open dataset of places published under a commercial-friendly licence. It gives us a name, a location, a category and, for most properties, a website. We keep every property it lists, so the “indexed” count on a city page is the whole city as the data knows it, including hotels we could not read.

How facts are gathered

Our crawler reads the hotel’s own website, up to a dozen pages: rooms, facilities, breakfast, policies. A language model reads each page and reports facts from a fixed list of 53 things we check, such as parking, a lift, cots or an accessible room. For every fact it must copy the sentence that states it, word for word.

That sentence is then checked, by code, against the page. If it is not there, the fact is discarded. The model cannot add anything it cannot point to, and what it points to is what you see under each fact, in the original language with an English translation, and a link to the page.

A hotel saying it does not have something counts too: “Pets are not allowed” is a fact, and it is listed as the hotel saying no. A website that never mentions parking is not evidence either way, and the page says “not stated”.

How the score is built

Each fact carries a weight for the kind of trip the page is rated for. A desk weighs a lot for remote work and nothing for families; cots the other way round. The score is the weighted share of points earned across the facts we have evidence for. Facts we have no evidence for enter at a neutral value with their weight halved, so a hotel is not punished for a website that says little, and not rewarded for it either.

A hotel is published once it has at least five distinct verified facts. Below that we do not think a page is worth your time, and we keep it out of search engines.

Photos

Photos come from the hotel’s own website. Each one is labelled by a model as a room, a pool, an exterior and so on, and only those kinds are shown; staff portraits, logos and banners are deleted. Every photo links back to the hotel’s site. A hotel that wants a photo removed can write to us and it goes the same day.

Distances

Stations, airports, landmarks and beaches come from OpenStreetMap. Distances on a hotel page are straight lines from the hotel’s coordinates, not walking routes, so treat 350 m as “a few minutes” rather than a promise.

What we do not do

• No hotel can pay to be listed, to be ranked higher, or to change a fact.
• We do not write descriptions. The short summary on a hotel page is assembled from its verified facts and nothing else.
• We do not use guest reviews yet. When we do, they will be shown as what they are, separately from what the hotel states.
• We do not read sites that ask crawlers not to. Our crawler identifies itself as ScoredHotelsBot and respects robots.txt.

Corrections

If a fact is wrong, the sentence we quote will show why: either the website changed or the model misread it. Either way, write to [email protected] with the page link and it gets fixed and re-read.