| Why Trust Us? |
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| Who we are |
| Fiona Duncan and Leonie Glass have created this website. We have been investigating, evaluating and reviewing hotels for 20 years and our research has been published in numerous hotel guides, travel guides and travel articles. We met when working in a publishing house, and we went on to become joint series editors of the Charming Small Hotel Guides, researching and writing about hotels of character across Europe and in the US. To compile our Charming Small Hotel Guide to Venice, for example, we each spent 27 consecutive nights in 27 different Venetian hotels – still our record! We both continue to be closely connected with the Charming Small Hotel Guides. In 1998 Fiona began contributing regular travel features to the Sunday Telegraph and is now the paper’s chief hotel critic, writing in the Travel section about hotels all over the world. Her weekly column about British hotels is called The Hotel Guru. |
| Why we want to help |
| We know the qualities that make a good hotel; and all the signs of a poor hotel as well. Over the years we have received hundreds of requests, from friends, acquaintances and total strangers, for hotel recommendations. We realised that there was very little truly independent, impartial advice about hotels on the internet and decided to do something about it. |
| How we are independent |
| The hotels listed on this website are our ten favourite in a city or region. Hotels DO NOT PAY to be on the website; in this way we can select exactly who is featured. Once included in a Top Ten list, each hotel is asked to contribute a small annual service charge in return, not for a place on the list, but simply for a direct link to their own website. That’s it: no fee, no link, though we do supply the address of every hotel listed, whether they have paid for a link or not, and we supply the contact details, including website address, of hotels that have not paid the service charge. |
| Continued expansion |
| The Hotel Guru was launched in 2006 with hotel recommendations in cities and regions that we already know, backed by a small team of trusted travel writers and locals to check out our selections. As it expands, we will investigate further afield, and increase the destinations we cover. |
| Independent travel |
| We favour independent travel rather than using booking agents, travel agents and tour operators, and we believe that guests benefit from having direct contact with the hotel they have chosen. Visiting the hotel’s own website is important too, as it gives a good indication of how the hotel sees itself. We are not a travel agent or a tour operator. We simply want to point people in the direction of good hotels. |
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