Method
How We Select Hotels
The rules behind every shortlist on this site, including what we do not know.
Two layers
The first layer is the data. Every property carries a type, a review score and review count, a nightly price reference, a set of amenity flags, coordinates and distances to the landmarks that anchor most New York trips. That is what decides whether a property is eligible for a page at all.
The second layer is editorial. A property that clears the data threshold still has to earn its place in a specific shortlist: it has to add something the others do not, and we have to be able to say what that is. If we cannot answer why is this here, it does not go on the page.
How we rank
Not on the raw review score. A ten out of ten from a single review is not evidence that a hotel is better than an eight point nine from four thousand stays. Rankings use a score pulled toward the average of the comparison set in proportion to how few reviews it rests on. The page always shows the raw score and the review count next to each other so you can see what is behind it.
What we do not claim
- We have not stayed in these hotels. No page here contains first-person experience, because there is none to report.
- Prices are a snapshot, not a rate. Every figure comes from a August 2026 data pull and is labelled as such.
- Amenity flags are not verified inspections. 220 of the 369 New York City properties still carry an open verification flag in our records. Where a feature would decide your booking, confirm it with the hotel.
- Some locations are recorded only at borough level. 132 of our New York City properties have no confirmed neighborhood, so they do not appear on an area page. We would rather leave an area unpublished than guess it from an address.
- Where we did fill a neighborhood in, two sources had to agree. We tested reverse geocoding against the properties whose neighborhood the source already confirms. It matched about three quarters of the time and answered for only half of them, and its mistakes were systematic rather than random: it reads the blocks west of Fifth Avenue in the 10019 ZIP as Midtown East. So a proposed neighborhood is only used when the property address independently backs it up, either by naming the area or through a ZIP code that can only mean one place.
Distances
Every distance is a straight line between coordinates. We do not publish walking times, because we hold coordinates and not verified pedestrian routes, and converting one into the other with a formula produces a number that looks precise and is not.
Commercial independence
Commission does not move a hotel up a list. The selection rules above work the same way whether a property is bookable through our partner or not.