A hotel earns an entry through its building, not its budget

Why an index

Most writing about hotels is written to sell something. It is arranged by mood, it is scored out of ten, and it is refreshed whenever the scoring stops working. We wanted the opposite: a fixed list, a fixed format and a visible record of changes, so that a reader can compare two hotels without first working out what the writer was being paid.

An index makes that possible because the format does the arguing. Every hotel gets the same structure, the same fact box and the same amount of room. A lodge in the Northern Territory and a capsule floor in Sydney are described in the same way, and the difference between them is left to the reader rather than settled with adjectives.

Who does this

Three writers and one photographer, working from Hobart since 2019. One writer covers the Australian sections, one covers the ice hotels, and one handles corrections, the log and the legal pages. The photographer works to commission and holds copyright in their own work. No names or portraits are published, because the entries are compiled rather than authored, and a byline would suggest otherwise.

Where our details come from

From public sources only: hotel and operator sites, architectural publications, park and tourism authority material, and industry reference guides. We do not publish stay reports and we do not use guest reviews. The sources page sets out what is taken from each.