Here's How We Came Up With Our List Of The World's Best Hotels
To create it, we aggregated four notable hotel rankings: Travel + Leisure's World's Best Hotel Awards, Condé Nast Traveler's Top 100 Hotels & Resorts (part of its annual Reader's Choice Awards), TripAdvisor's Top 25 Hotels In The World (part of its annual Travelers' Choice Awards), and the Fodor's 100 Hotel Awards.
We gave each hotel a numerical rating based on how many lists it appeared on and how high it appeared on the lists that were ranked. Hotels that appeared on all four lists ranked higher on our list, while hotels that ranked on only one of these lists ended up closer to the bottom.
For Travel + Leisure's and Condé Nast Traveler's lists, which were both ranked one to 100, we calculated the score by using the following formula: 100-X (hotel ranking) + 1 / 100. With this formula, the highest possible score is 0.99 and the lowest score is 0.
For TripAdvisor's list, which was ranked out of 25, we calculated the score with this formula: 25-X (hotel ranking) + 1 /25.
Each time a hotel appeared on the Fodor's list, we gave it a score of 0.25, since the hotels on that list were not ranked.
Because we felt that Travel + Leisure and Condé Nast Traveler were more prestigious rankings, we weighted those rankings more heavily.
We then tallied up the scores to create the final ranking.
Here is the spreadsheet showing our calculations (click to enlarge):
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