How we compare
The substance of this page is also in our terms, in the language terms have to be written in. This is the plain-English version: how we are paid, why we show no prices, what the default ordering is computed from, and where every field on a hotel page comes from.
How we are paid
Some of the links out to tour operators are affiliate links. If you book after following one, the operator pays us a commission. It never changes your price, and it never changes where a hotel appears, or whether it appears at all.
That is the whole of the commercial relationship. There is no paid inclusion, no sponsored placement and no advertising on the site.
Why we show no prices
A package price depends on your dates, your departure airport, your board basis, your room type and how many of you are travelling — and it moves through the day. A price captured this morning is wrong by this afternoon, and a wrong price is worse than no price at all.
So we compare the hotel, which changes slowly, and send you to the operator for the price, which does not. Nothing on this site is sorted, filtered or ranked by price, because we hold none.
How the default ordering works
"Recommended" is computed from three things we own outright, in this order: how many UK operators feature the hotel, how much of its record we have actually measured, and how recently that record changed. Nothing else feeds it.
The middle one is a measure of us rather than of the hotel — how many photographs we hold, how much of the facility list we have confirmed, whether we have measured what is within walking distance, the airports and the month-by-month climate. A hotel we can describe fully is a more useful answer than one we can barely describe.
A guest-review score used to lead this list. We hold no licence to republish one, so it no longer appears anywhere on the site — and it no longer ranks anything either.
Ranking is not for sale. No operator, hotel or chain can pay for position, for inclusion, or for a filter to favour them — and there is no mechanism by which they could, because the ordering is a database sort over those three values and nothing more.
You can override it at any time: sort by star rating, or by how many operators feature a hotel.
Where each field comes from
Every figure on a hotel or resort page comes from one of these, and each is re-checked on its own schedule:
- description, photographs, facilities, star rating — the tour operators’ own listings; re-checked on a regular schedule
- monthly temperature and rainfall — weather-station records and the ERA5 climate archive; reviewed yearly, with the station and averaging period named on the page
- sea temperature — Copernicus ERA5 monthly means; yearly
- daylight, sunrise and sunset — computed from the resort’s own coordinates, not fetched from anywhere
- coordinates, place names and the place hierarchy — GeoNames
- airports and IATA codes — OurAirports; monthly
- distance to the airport — computed as the crow flies from the hotel’s coordinates; a road transfer time appears only where one has been measured, and is labelled differently when it has
- what is nearby — OpenStreetMap; about every six months
- bathing-water classification — the European Environment Agency; once a season
- elevation — the SRTM terrain model; effectively fixed
Sections built from a licensed source carry that source’s credit beneath them, including where we show only a derived number such as a count or a distance.
What we do when we do not know
Sections disappear rather than degrade. A resort with no nearby weather station has no climate section. A hotel with no measured road route shows a straight-line distance, described as a straight-line distance. A figure we are not licensed to publish, or cannot stand behind, is not shown at all.
The one thing we will not do is fill a gap with something plausible. An invented number is indistinguishable from a real one to the person reading it, which is exactly what makes it worth refusing.
Telling us something is wrong
If something on the site is wrong, tell us through the contact page. Please include the address of the page, what is wrong, and anything that helps us verify it — where the correct information can be seen, for instance.
We check a report against the operators’ own data before changing a page, so a correction can take a few days to appear.