Editorial standards

Who writes these articles

Every article on this site is published under a single byline: The Hotelaholic.

The Hotelaholic is not a person. It's an AI writer with a very specific job description — a fixed set of rules about what makes a hotel worth writing about, how a recommendation gets phrased, and what it is never allowed to claim. Those rules were written by us and they don't drift between articles. That consistency is the point. You get the same standard applied to Lisbon that you get to Bora Bora.

Hotelaholic™ publishes this site and is responsible for what appears on it.

What "we haven't stayed there" means

We haven't. Not in most of them, and we won't pretend otherwise.

What you're reading is research: property descriptions, room categories and facilities as supplied by our data provider, location relative to the things you'd actually leave the hotel for, and the guest rating summaries the provider publishes for a property. That's a real basis for a recommendation. It is not the same as a night in the room, and we will never write it as though it were.

So you will not find an invented anecdote anywhere on this site. No stories about the concierge who saved our anniversary, no meals we didn't eat, no sunsets we didn't watch. If a detail is in an article, it's because it's checkable — which floors face the water, how long the walk to the old town really takes, which hotel restaurant locals book on their own.

Where the information comes from

Hotel details, photos and guest rating summaries are provided by LiteAPI and shown from the provider's own sources. Guest review text is loaded fresh each time you open a hotel and is not stored by us. Prices, taxes and availability are never quoted here — check them live at book.hotelaholic.com.

Star ratings, facility lists and score summaries are the provider's figures, not ours. We don't alter them, and we don't present a rating as our own verdict. Our judgement is limited to which hotels we write about and the order we put them in.

How a hotel earns a place

1. A destination gets picked for a reason specific to it — a season, a neighbourhood problem, a thing the city does that nowhere else does.
2. The four- and five-star properties listed for that area are pulled from our booking partner's inventory, then most of them are cut.
3. What survives has to earn it. One thing a hotel does that no other hotel within fifty miles can do. Marble, thread count and a good lobby are the entry fee at this level, not a reason to write about somewhere.
4. The order is argued, not assumed. Hotels appear in a stated order and the reason for that order is on the page, along with a one-line caveat on every property.
5. It's dated on publication, and the date on the article is the date the article was last changed.

What we won't do

• We won't sell a placement. No hotel, group or PR agency has ever paid to appear on this site, to move up a list, or to have a caveat removed. If that ever changes, this line changes first and the article says so at the top.
• We won't pretend everything is good. Most articles name a famous property we deliberately left out, and say why. A recommendation site that can't say no isn't recommending anything.
• We won't quote a nightly rate. Rates are wrong within a week. We use bands and tell you what moves them — high season versus shoulder, which view costs what.
• We won't take anyone else's words. Every article is written from scratch for this site.

Things go out of date, and some things are just wrong

Hotels renovate. Restaurants close. A chef leaves and the reason we recommended a property leaves with them. On top of that, an AI writer can simply get something wrong, and ours sometimes does.

Every article carries the date it was last updated. If you're reading something more than six months old, weigh it accordingly. Either way, anything that would change your mind about booking is worth confirming with the property before you pay.

Tell us when we're wrong

If a detail in an article is wrong, we'd rather hear it than not: support@hotelaholic.com

Where a report is correct, the article gets changed and its date moves to the day it changed. Nothing gets quietly patched and backdated.

How we make money

When you book a hotel through a link on this site, we earn a commission from the booking platform. You pay the same rate you'd pay going direct — the commission comes out of the platform's margin, not your bill.

Bookings are handled by our booking partner, not by us. We're not the merchant of record, we don't hold your payment, and we can't change or cancel a reservation on your behalf. Your booking confirmation will tell you who to contact.

That commission is the entire business model. It's also why the rules above exist in writing: the fastest way to destroy an affiliate site is to let the commission pick the hotels.