Five facts
The method, the sources, and the things this guide does not publish.
Why the format is fixed
A guide that allows itself unlimited space will fill it. Five numbered statements per hotel remove that option. Anything we cannot state plainly, and anything a reader could not check against a published source, has nowhere to sit, so it is dropped rather than softened into an adjective. The discipline also makes the entries comparable: an ice hotel in Lapland and a transit cabin in an airport terminal are answered with the same five questions, in the same order, at the same length.
The format cuts out most of what fills hotel writing. There is no room for a scene of arrival, for a paragraph about the light, for a summary of how a stay felt. What survives is the building, its situation, its season and its practical conditions.
What the five statements mean
The first says what kind of hotel it is and how it is organised. The second is about the structure: what it was built as, what happened to it, and what the conversion kept or removed. The third places it, in a district and in a landscape, and says what is within reach on foot. The fourth is about time of year, and it explains why one season suits the place and another does not.
The fifth is always practical, and it never judges the hotel. It states a condition to prepare for: a shared washing room, a bed of ice, an uneven stone stair, the noise of a terminal, a ferry, an altitude, a road. These are facts about a place, not complaints about a business, and they are written that way. Above the five stands a single line that compresses the hotel into one sentence, and below them the month in which the entry was last read.
Where the material comes from
Entries are built from published sources: the hotels' own material, architectural and design publications, museum and municipal records, and reporting in the general press. Where a claim is specific, it comes from a source we can point to. Where sources disagree, the entry says less rather than choosing between them.
We do not publish accounts of stays, and we do not say or imply that the editors have slept anywhere described here. We do not use guest reviews, scores or aggregated sentiment of any kind. Hotels change hands, change names and close; entries carry the month they were last read so that a reader can judge how old the reading is.
What is not published here
No prices, no star classifications, no scores or rankings, no room counts. No booking, no availability, no enquiry forwarding, no affiliate links and no paid placement of any kind. Nobody can buy an entry, and nobody can buy a change to one. We accept factual corrections and nothing else.
Why an international guide has a Casino Hotels section
Four Canadian buildings earned a place on the same grounds as everything else here: an unusual structure with a clear reason to stand where it does. One of them occupies pavilions built for a world exhibition; the others are shaped by a waterfall, a river marina and a lake shore. The gaming floor is outside the scope of this guide. We do not describe it, assess it or encourage anyone toward it, and the five facts stay on the building, the rooms, the restaurants, the concert halls and the journey there.