How we rank and order hotels
What decides the order of search results, what does not, and whether anyone can pay to appear higher.
Last reviewed 2026-08-08
Nobody can buy a position
No hotel, chain or supplier pays us for placement, position, a badge or a label. There is no sponsored inventory, no promoted listing and no advertising on a results page. If a property is at the top, it is because the ordering rules put it there.
Our own margin is not an input either. The ordering does not know what we earn on a rate, and would not change if it did.
What the default order actually is
The default sort is labelled Popularity, and it applies two rules in this order:
- Availability first. Properties with rooms actually bookable for your dates and occupancy come above those without. A beautiful hotel you cannot book is not a useful first result.
- Then review volume. Among available properties, the ones with more guest reviews come first — the number of reviews, not the score.
The set of properties being ordered is whatever the supplier returns for your search area, filtered by any filters you have applied.
The bias in that default, stated plainly
Ranking by review volume favours large, long-established properties over small or newly-opened ones, which can be excellent and simply have not accumulated reviews yet. That is a real weakness of the default, not a feature, and it is the reason the sort control sits at the top of every results page rather than buried in a menu.
If you are looking for value rather than familiarity, sorting by price or by guest rating will surface a genuinely different set of properties. We would rather tell you that than let the default quietly decide for you.
The orderings you can choose instead
- Price: low to high and high to low — by the cheapest available rate for your dates, in your selected currency, taxes and fees included. This is the same figure you would be charged, not a headline rate.
- Guest rating — by the property's guest review score, highest first, regardless of how many reviews it has. Where that score comes from is set out in our review policy.
Choosing any of these replaces the default entirely. None of them is re-weighted, blended or quietly adjusted afterwards.
Filters remove, they never promote
Star rating, price range, minimum guest score, amenities, board type, free cancellation and distance from the search-area centre all work by excluding properties that do not match. None of them moves a property up. Hotels with no coordinates are not excluded by the distance filter, and an amenity we cannot map to supplier data is ignored rather than used to exclude — in both cases because silently dropping a property for missing data would be a worse error than showing it.