Hotels worth staying at — without the noise of fake reviews.

Most hotel directories surface what their advertiser pool pays for. HotelScout doesn't. We don't take placement fees. We don't run “featured hotel” upsells. We don't accept paid review submissions. We're here because we got tired of clicking through ranked lists where the top spots were just the highest-bidder slots.

What we do

HotelScout curates around 13,000 hotels across 179 countries from verified third-party data — guest ratings, amenities, locations, photos, and neighborhood context. Every property page goes through an editorial gate before it ships: minimum description quality, verified geography, real photos hosted on our own CDN. Properties that don't pass the gate stay invisible to visitors.

We organize the catalog by destination first and by editorial collections second — “boutique hotels in Lisbon”, “family resorts on the Turkish Riviera”, “rooftop pools in Marrakech”. The blog goes deeper on cities we keep sending readers to.

How we make money

HotelScout participates in the Booking.com affiliate program. When you book a hotel through one of our outbound links, we receive a referral commission from Booking.com. The price you pay is the same whether you arrive via our site or directly. Full mechanics on the Affiliate Disclosure page.

What we don't do

• No paid placements. A hotel cannot pay to appear in our catalog, to rank higher, or to win a “featured” slot. There is no “sponsored hotel” tier.
• No fake reviews. We don't generate review text. Aggregate ratings shown on our property pages come from the Booking.com source feed — we surface the number; we don't fabricate it.
• No editorial influence from affiliate revenue. The sorting on our pages is by guest rating, not by commission rate. We've never altered descriptions to drive bookings.
• No review manipulation. We don't accept payments to remove negative reviews or boost favorable ones.

How we choose which hotels to include

We publish the full criteria — guest rating thresholds, photo requirements, geography verification, the editorial gate — on the How We Choose Hotels page. If a property is in our catalog, it cleared every line on that page.

Getting in touch

Editorial corrections, partnership inquiries, press: [email protected]. We respond within 24-48 hours.