How hotels enter this index, how they are scored, and what is published
finehotels.world is an index of hotels that hold at least one of four independent distinctions. It does not review hotels. It records which awards a property holds, scores those awards on a fixed published formula, and links out to the awarding body so any reader can check the fact for themselves.
A property is listed if it holds at least one of the following:
Awards are facts about a property, published by the awarding body. This index records them and links to the listing that evidences them. It reproduces none of the awarding bodies' written reviews.
The score is a point total computed only from award facts. No editorial judgement, no rate data, no traffic signal, and nothing supplied by a hotel about itself enters it. The formula is fixed and published here so that the number can be reproduced from the award facts shown on any hotel page.
MICHELIN Keys
| Keys | Points |
|---|---|
| Three Keys | 30 |
| Two Keys | 20 |
| One Key | 8 |
The step from one Key to two is deliberately larger than the step from two to three. One Key is a wide field; three is a short list.
Forbes Travel Guide Five Star: 6 points. Flat, because it is a pass or fail rating rather than a graded one.
The World's 50 Best Hotels: each edition is scored on its own, and the 2023, 2024 and 2025 editions are weighted equally, so three consistent years outrank one strong year.
| Rank in an edition | Points for that edition |
|---|---|
| 1 to 10 | 14 |
| 11 to 25 | 12 |
| 26 to 50 | 9 |
| 51 to 100 | 5 |
The sum across editions is capped at 40 points, so repeated top-ten placement cannot outweigh the Keys and Forbes signals entirely.
La Liste: one point for each half point of rating above 97.0, capped at 6 points. This is deliberately a minor sway. It moves a hotel within its band rather than between bands.
Display scale. The point total is internal. Pages show a figure out of ten, scaled linearly from a floor of 5 points to a ceiling of 81 points, which is the highest total any property in the index currently reaches. The floor is not zero because every hotel here already cleared a real bar, so the displayed scale starts at 5.0 rather than at 0.
The scoring code is a single file in the repository, scripts/rights/prestige.py, and the published dataset is generated from it. Every published score in the dataset reproduces exactly from the award facts published alongside it.
The one or two sentence descriptor on each hotel card and page is composed by template from structured facts held in this index: name, city, country, room count, awards held, and the prestige score. It is generated, not written by hand, and it is not derived from any third party's writing.
A small number of properties additionally carry a longer profile. Those are written for this site and carry a credit.
An image is displayed only where all of the following are recorded for it: the credit to show, the licence basis it rests on, and the source URL it came from. Where those are not held, the property is shown as a typographic card with no image. A missing photograph is treated as preferable to an uncredited one.
Current licence basis. Every image now displayed comes from the property's own published media, is credited to the property with a link to the source, and is used editorially in the context of recording that property's awards.
Host allowlist. Images are self hosted and served from this site's own paths. A build time check fails the build if any image reference in the served dataset or the built pages points at a host outside an explicit allowlist, or if any image lacks a credit, a licence and a source URL. The check is scripts/rights/check_image_rights.py and it runs as part of the build.
Third party subjects. The index does not assert model or property releases for people, private property, artwork or trademarks appearing in any photograph. Use is editorial.
This index does not publish nightly rates, and does not collect them.
An earlier version of the site derived a typical nightly rate and a deal comparison from rate quotes gathered automatically from a third party search product. That collection path, the stored history it produced, and every surface that displayed it have been removed. The stored history was deleted rather than carried over.
Rate display can only return under an explicit permission recorded per property in data/rate_permissions.json, which is empty at the time of writing. Nothing renders a rate unless a permission entry exists for that property. Booking links remain ordinary outbound links to the hotel or its booking channel: linking out is not the thing that required permission.
Each hotel page links to the public award listing that evidences its MICHELIN Keys award. Award schemes are published by MICHELIN, Forbes Travel Guide, The World's 50 Best Hotels and La Liste respectively, and each remains the authority on its own award. This index is independent of all four and is not endorsed by any of them.
Corrections are welcome. If an award fact here is wrong or out of date, or if a property wishes an image removed, the change will be made on request.
Some outbound links to booking sites are affiliate links, served through Stay22's Let Me Allez service. If you book through one of them this site may earn a commission from the booking platform, at no cost to you. Affiliate routing has no input into the index: rankings and prestige scores are computed from public award data alone, before any link exists, and no hotel or booking platform can pay to appear or to rank higher.