Method
How we review hotels
Last reviewed: 2026-08-07
Hotel pages on TravelShifu are desk assessments unless a named stay review says otherwise. We join editorial prose to ingested property rows, cite scores with dates, and refuse invented rates, photos or kilometre claims.
What evidence goes on a hotel page?
Each property page joins editorial prose to an ingested supplier row: legal name, address, star class when supplied, amenity list, check-in and check-out times, supplier rating with count and capture date, sentiment category scores with short summaries, pro and con highlights, and POI kilometre rows when those distances exist on the row.
Images come only from supplier CDN URLs already attached to that row. We never invent a photo URL, a LiteAPI id, a nightly rate or a distance we cannot show in the source data.
What “desk assessment” means here
Unless a page carries a first-party stay review with a named reviewer and stay date, the verdict is a desk assessment. The byline states that we have not stayed. Supplier scores appear as attributed, dated text only — never as schema.org aggregateRating, which we treat as a manual-action risk.
A desk assessment still reaches a clear verdict and says who the hotel is not for. Hedging without a decision is a failed page, not a cautious one.
How a city shortlist is built
A seeded city publishes only when a city editorial and a hotel editorial exist for every property on that city’s pages. Matchups are hand-curated either/or pairs, not combinatorial generators. We do not invent hotel rows to fill a template.
CTAs go to live hotel partners (Booking, Agoda, Trip.com, Vrbo and related programmes in our registry) and are labelled before the click. Defunct programmes never appear.
What we will not claim
We do not invent awards, “best of” prices, occupancy guesses or accessibility outcomes we have not verified. When POI distance, price or amenity data is missing, we omit the claim or say we do not know.
Material errors are corrected with an updated review date and, when useful site-wide, a note on the corrections log. Report problems to hello@travelshifu.com with the page URL.
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