Which Hotel Should I Use?

Once you have picked your destination the two most important things to me are, how am I going to get there and where am I going to stay. I don’t know about you but I want my accommodations to be excellent. Trip Advisor includes Very Good and Average in their percentages and sometimes I wonder how they rank their hotels because the number one hotels are not always the ones with the most excellent and/or very good reviews and price is not even a factor. Usually their average price listed does not even come close to the real price.  

The other concern that I have with subjective reviews is if you only have a couple of reviews, it could be the hotel putting out good reviews to boost their ranking. On the contrary, if you have only a couple of reviews and they are bad it could be because someone had a bad experience because people tend to complain more than compliment and many people are super demanding and critical.

Last and very important is cost. My thought is for a hotel to get a lot of reviews, high rankings and to keep their cost down is golden.  I don’t want an average hotel with a high cost so I have devised a method that considers number of reviews, percentage of excellent reviews and price to come up with a Power Rating

Note:

  • I usually will not consider a hotel under 4 stars and never under 3 stars.
  • I prefer boutique hotels to chain hotels.
  • Although prices change from season to season, my assumption is that prices stay in concert with other hotels in the area.

Power Rating Calculation –

Number of reviews:  More reviews means less subjectivity

  • 1-25 = 1 point
  • 26-50 = 2 points
  • 51-75 = 3 points
  • 76-100 = 4 points
  • over  100 = 5 points

Percent of total reviews that are excellent:

  • 25%-50% = 2
  • 51%-75% = 4
  • 76%-100% = 6

Cost compared to the average cost of the hotels included in the comparison:  

  • Highest price <.50 = 1 points
  • .51-.75 =2 points
  • .75-1.0 = 3 points
  • 1.25-1.50 = 3 points
  • 1.51-1.75 = 4 points
  • 1.76-2.0 = 5 points
  • Lowest Price > 2.0 = 6 points.

See my pre-review of Iguazu Falls to see this in action.