The logic behind luxury hotel rankings can be opaque and confounding, leaving many to wonder if they're worth using at all.Illustration by Dave Murray
Earlier this year, Michelin launched its first Hotel Guide, now rating hotels as it has ranked restaurants for a century. Hotels are awarded up to three Keys depending on various criteria, including interior design, quality of service and value for price.
Michelin’s Keys join the Forbes Travel Guide’s stars, AAA’s diamonds and many other independent rating systems as forms of quality assurance for travellers. While there may be overlap in their selections of top hotels, these programs operate independently of one another and no ranking is recognized as being superior. This undoubtedly makes for a confusing experience when you’re trying to find a nice place to stay that’s worthy of your time and dollars. With the addition of customer reviews on a hotel’s own website and search engines such as Google and travel sites such as Booking.com aggregating more opinions, trusting any of them can feel like a gamble.
“The landscape for travel is cluttered, so confusing and so hard to navigate in today’s world with the excess of information out there,” says Jamsheed Pocha, co-founder of the Pelican Club, a membership-based luxury travel planning service. “It’s so hard to actually understand what’s right for you as an individual.”
The first star rating system in North American was funded by gas company Mobil and named the Mobil Travel Guide. Inspired by the work Michelin was doing with restaurant guides in France, a group of anonymous inspectors visited hotels in Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico – where Mobil gas stations could be found – and produced the first guide in 1958. In 2005, the Mobil Travel Guide was acquired and renamed Forbes Travel Guide with the same 900-point criteria for grading.
The specifics of what Forbes or any of the other organizations grade on are not available to the public, which is why search aggregators like Skyscanner try to help travellers make sense of it all. When searching for a hotel on the website, users will see a star rating associated with each property that is the average of several ratings systems. “They are sourced from Tripadvisor, online travel agencies, direct reviews on sites and then averaged out on our site,” says Gemma Jamieson, global public relations manager for Skyscanner. “We try to give the best representative view of what your travel options are, and then our customer reviews are separate.” This also helps to mitigate the variation that can happen between countries, which often have their own rating standards and could mean what you get at four-star hotels in Japan and Croatia is different.
Pocha, however, cautions that even among the same level of ratings there can be great diversity. “I don’t think that star ratings have caught up with what luxury is,” he says. “If you look at a city like London, you could consider the Standard London a five-star hotel. It’s a beautiful hotel. It’s got an art deco feel to it. It’s got 24-hour room service, multiple food and beverage outlets. It’s got a beautiful gym. Can you put it in the same category as Claridge’s or the Dorchester? I don’t think so.”
How hotels use the ratings can also be diverse. For many, it’s simply a marketing tool, but others, such as Wymara Resort + Villas in Turks and Caicos, adopt the ranking criteria as a means of quality control.
Despite the resort already being a member of Leading Hotels of the World, a collection of independent luxury properties, Shelley Rincon, Wymara’s CEO and general manager, wanted the hotel to be assessed by Forbes because it’s “one of the most prestigious and globally recognized rating systems in luxury hospitality,” she says. “Their focus is on service excellence, personalized guest experiences and high-quality standards, and all of these aspects align with our core values and culture.”
The hotel has been awarded four stars from Forbes and is awaiting its 2025 ranking, which should be available in January. Whether it retains its four stars or receives a fifth, Rincon and her team will be using the Forbes criteria as a way of tweaking how the property operates. “The goal for us is really to not switch this on and switch it off,” she says. “It’s a great program and model for us to align our ambition of striving for excellence in everything that we do. We can work with Forbes as a training tool.” This includes assessing everything from how often a guest in engaged when ordering a drink at the hotel bar to whether housekeeping staff place shoes neatly together when they service a hotel room.
Pocha’s advice for travellers is to look for real opinions from people you know have the same taste as you. “Whether that’s your travel advisor or another family that’s been on a similar trip,” he says. “In today’s world, everybody’s vetting everything.”
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