The score at the top of the page is an average of thousands of stays, across years, by people who wanted completely different things from the place than you do. It is the least useful number on the screen.
Choosing accommodation is the single most time-consuming part of planning a trip. It's also the decision people most often get wrong — not because they didn't research enough, but because they researched the wrong things.
This is the process we actually use. Six checks, in order, roughly eight minutes per property. Do them and you'll make better decisions in a fraction of the time.
Read the last ten reviews, not the average
The most important two minutes
Hotels change hands. Managers leave. The family that ran the place for fifteen years sells it to a group. A renovation happens, or doesn't happen when it should have.
An average score compresses all of that into one number and hides the direction of travel. A hotel drifting from excellent to mediocre and a hotel climbing back from a bad patch can show you the same 8.7.
Sort by most recent and read ten. That's the hotel you would be booking. If the last ten are noticeably worse than the average, something changed — and you're about to find out what.
Filter by traveller type
The filter almost nobody uses
Every major booking site lets you filter reviews by who wrote them — couples, families with young children, solo travellers, business travellers. It's usually a dropdown most people never open.
It matters enormously. A hotel rated 9.4 by couples can be genuinely difficult with a toddler: no lift, a restaurant that opens at eight, thin walls, a pool with no shallow end. None of that shows up in the overall score, because the people who cared about it were a minority of reviewers.
Filter to your own situation and read those reviews only. The score often moves by a full point.
Read the three-star reviews
Where the honest information lives
Five-star reviews are usually short and tell you nothing: "Lovely stay, would return." One-star reviews are usually one bad night amplified by a bad mood — a noisy neighbour, a rude receptionist, a booking error.
The three-star reviews are written by people trying to be fair. They liked some things and not others, and they explain both. That's where you learn that the breakfast is excellent but the walls are thin, or that the location is perfect but the rooms facing the street are unusable in summer.
If you only read one category of review, read the three-star ones. They're the only reviews written by people with nothing to prove.
Check the location on a map, not in the photos
The most common expensive mistake
"Five minutes from the historic centre" is a sentence written by someone with a car, or measured in a straight line, or simply optimistic.
Open Google Maps. Drop a pin on the hotel. Set the route to the place you'll actually walk to most — the old town, the station, the beach — and switch it to walking. The number that comes back is the real one.
Then do this, which takes thirty seconds and is the single best thing on this list:
Drag the Street View figure onto the hotel's street. Look at what's actually there — the road width, whether there's a bar directly below, whether the "quiet residential area" is quiet, whether the "sea view" faces a car park.
If a hotel listing has plenty of interior photos and none of the building from outside, there is usually a reason. Street View tells you what the photographer chose not to show.
Or skip the eight minutes per hotel
Every plan we write includes three to five vetted options with the reasoning behind each — where they are, who they suit, and what the trade-off is. We take no commission from any of them.
See how it worksWork out what the score is hiding
Category scores, not the headline number
Booking sites break the overall rating into categories: cleanliness, location, staff, facilities, value, comfort. Most people glance past this.
Look for the gap. A hotel with 9.5 for location and 7.1 for comfort is telling you something precise: it's in the right place and the rooms are tired. Whether that matters depends on whether you're using the room to sleep in between long days out, or spending afternoons in it.
Two hotels can both average 8.6 and be completely different propositions. The categories are where you find out which one you're looking at.
Check the number of reviews, not just the score
Thirty seconds, prevents one specific problem
A 9.8 from 22 reviews and a 8.9 from 3,400 reviews are not comparable. The first is a small sample that a handful of enthusiastic stays can carry; the second is a stable measurement.
New properties can genuinely be excellent — and they're often better value, because they haven't accumulated the reputation to charge for it yet. But treat a very high score from very few reviews as a hypothesis rather than a fact, and lean harder on steps 1 and 4.
The three things that actually decide it
After the checks are done
Once you've filtered down to two or three real candidates, the decision usually comes down to the same three things:
- Location relative to what you'll do — not to the geographic centre, but to the places on your actual itinerary. A hotel twenty minutes from everything costs you forty minutes a day.
- Noise — the most common cause of a genuinely ruined stay, and the thing photographs cannot show you. Search the reviews for the word directly.
- Whether breakfast is worth having — in some places it saves you an hour and a decision every morning. In others you're paying twenty euros for packaged croissants next to a street full of good bakeries.
Book directly with the hotel when the price is the same or close. You will usually get a better room, more flexibility if something changes, and a human being to talk to if something goes wrong.
Use the booking platforms to research and compare — that's what they're excellent at — then check the hotel's own site before you confirm.
How long this actually takes
Eight minutes per property, three to five properties per destination, and more if you're indecisive. For a week-long trip with two bases, that's an evening — assuming you already know which neighbourhoods to be looking in, which is its own research problem.
That's the honest arithmetic, and it's why accommodation is the part of planning people most often rush and most often regret.
We do this part for you
Three to five vetted options per trip, with the reasoning, the trade-offs, and direct booking links. No affiliate codes, no commission — which means we can tell you when the cheaper option is the better one.
Get your planFull itineraries from €15 · Delivered in 48 hours