Hotel Rating and Star Qualification
You can be surprised
Select
an hotel rating according its star qualification may
result a surprise when you arrive at
your destiny.
Hundreds
of authorities of the tourism,
governments and other institutions
try to describe with different ranks
of quality the diverse hotels and
brands. What you can find behind
that qualification not always
corresponds with your criteria or
expectative.
While
there are subjective evaluations on hotel rating
rather as those of the travel guides
or books, based in the “charmer”,
the “lovely”, etcetera, in Europe,
for example, the hotels star qualification does not express directly what
it seems to you.
The
European describes hotel rating using
objective and quantifiable criteria
like the facilities and amenities
available: elevators, bar, baths,
languages spoken by its employees,
room’s size, ventilation…
The
result can be amused. Thus you find
that a hotel in Spain, excellent by
its historical enchantment and its
privileged location, does not
receive five stars, but four,
because does not have in its
facilities elevator or swimming
pool.
In
general, in Europe the number of
stars to describe hotel rating talks about
a minimum of facilities and
amenities. But each country has its
own criteria of evaluation, so that
three stars in Great Britain are not
just like three stars in Spain. And
within each country the criterion
also is different. A hotel of three
stars in Barcelona is not just like
one of three stars in Madrid or
Seville.
If we go
to the United States, a uniform
criterion does not exist either on hotel rating. The
national rating is taken by private
companies. Mobil and AAA use
hundreds of criteria that can go
from the design to landscape to
establish the qualification of 1-5
in the American hotels.
Both
companies make inspection every year
to watch by the standards, but
although they use similar criteria,
the categories that grant can be
different. Mobil grants four stars
the same hotel that AAA describes
with five diamonds, as it happens
for example to the Wynn Las Vegas.
In spite
of this reality it is worthy to take
care of the qualifications of hotel rating, because if you
observe the different systems rules,
always you are going to find your
pearl of benefit.
In some
countries there are taxes incentives
if you take a minor hotel category.
Or it may be that behind a smaller
category, or even behind a hotel
without category, you find a
benefit. In France a hotel with less
than seven rooms never will show at
least a qualification star… although
it has luxury facilities or it is in
an enviable location.
Hope for
standard international norms on hotel rating does
not seem a coming soon reality,
although this theme is frequently
considered by the institutions of
different governments, hotels brand
and the independent organizations.
Become
reality an international norm to
grant hotels will be possible
perhaps when it is manageable to
conciliate the cultural and
geographic differences. After all,
how to conciliate on which it is a
good bed or the facilities that we
like in a bath or room?
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