How the score is calculated

A 9.8 from six guests is not better than a 9.2 from six thousand. Every rating is pulled toward the mean of its country in proportion to how little evidence stands behind it.

bayes = (v / (v + 50)) × rating + (50 / (v + 50)) × countryMean

v is the review count. Fifty reviews is where a hotel’s own rating carries as much weight as its country baseline. Below that the score is deliberately conservative.

Guests in different countries do not use the same scale — an 8.4 in Japan and an 8.4 in the United States describe different hotels. Normalising this away entirely would erase genuine quality differences, which are real and worth knowing. So we split the difference.

score = 0.70 × bayes + 0.30 × (bayes − countryMean + 7.0)

Seventy per cent is the hotel on its own terms; thirty per cent is the hotel relative to its neighbours.

Not price. A cheap hotel is not penalised and an expensive one is not rewarded. Price sits beside the score, never inside it.

Not stars. Awarded by national bodies to wildly different criteria; shown for reference only.

Not us. No editorial override, no promoted placement, no listing fee, and no form a hotel can fill in.

It inherits whatever bias exists in guest reviews, including unusually warm ratings at very small properties. Country baselines move slightly as coverage grows. Hotels with no reviews are not scored and never appear in a ranking.

Every scored hotel shows its own breakdown on its page — raw rating, review count, country mean and the weights used.