Find reviews of a hotel
Who reviews a hotel, and can you trust them?
Plumb does not review a hotel itself. We tell you which sites do, and grade each on the one thing that decides whether to believe it: how independent and evidence-based the ranking is.
| Grade | Review site | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | A | Grades: its lab-tested 'Best Buy' product verdicts A rare reviewer that buys and lab-tests products itself, takes no ads, and by its own disclosure keeps paid logo-licensing walled off from its ratings. |
| 2 | B+ | Grades: its anonymous-inspector restaurant stars The gold standard for hands-on, anonymous restaurant review, but its independence carries an asterisk now that tourism boards pay six figures to bring the Guide to town. |
| 3 | B+ | Grades: its curated restaurant guides and criticism A staff-curated food-media guide where restaurants can't buy onto the list, but the "essential" picks rest on editors' judgment, not a published, reproducible scoring method. |
| 4 | B | Grades: its staff restaurant reviews and city guides Genuinely independent restaurant reviews, owned by the bank whose card perks they feed. |
| 5 | B- | Grades: its diner-verified ratings and 'Diners' Choice' A reservation platform whose star ratings come only from verified diners — but the restaurants it lists are also its paying customers, and some pay to rank higher in search. |
| 6 | C+ | Grades: its open user reviews and 'Popularity Ranking' Anyone can post without visiting; ~9% of 2024 reviews were caught fake, and hotels buy the slots above. |
| 7 | C+ | Grades: its guest review scores and relevance ranking Verified guests give it real review data, but the properties it ranks also pay commission and can bid for top placement, so the ordering you see is partly an ad auction. |
| 8 | C+ | Grades: its passenger-review ratings and cruise awards Real cruisers and sea-tested editors drive the ratings, but Cruise Critic earns booking-referral commissions and doesn't publish the thresholds or verification rules behind its awards. |
| 9 | C+ | Grades: its customer-satisfaction surveys and 'highest-ranked' awards An award you mostly hear about because the winner paid to license it. |
| 10 | C- | Grades: its flight, hotel, and car comparison results A slick travel meta-search that compares hundreds of sites, but by its own disclosure its "Recommended" ranking factors in revenue potential and may down-rank cheaper offers that hurt monetization. |
| 11 | D+ | Grades: its airline and airport star ratings and awards The self-styled "Oscars of aviation" runs free passenger-voted awards alongside a paid audit/certification arm, and critics say earning money from the airlines it rates clouds its independence. |
These are the sites that review a hotel (and the rest of the travel & hospitality). Columns are the five rubric dimensions, scored 0-5, with each column's weight shown in its header (independence and evidence carry the most). See the full methodology.
All travel & hospitality → | Find another product or service