Where our prices come from, and how to read them

The source

Every price on this site is a meta-search estimate: the cheapest open-market rate a major hotel search engine sees for a night, after a couple of filters I apply. I don’t pull from the card portals. Chase Travel, Amex Travel and the rest price independently, sometimes above the open market, sometimes below it, and I have no feed from any of them.

That makes these numbers a screening tool, not a quote. They’re for finding the hotel and the dates worth checking; the number that matters is the one the portal shows you at booking. I would rather say that plainly at the top than have you find out at checkout.

Which rate gets picked

A meta-search page for one night at one hotel lists a dozen sellers. For each night I prefer a rate that sits at parity with the hotel’s own direct price, and fall back to the hotel’s brand-direct channel when there isn’t one. Nights quoted only by discount resellers are treated as unavailable rather than shown at a teaser price, because a card portal will not match a wholesaler’s rate and a $199 night you can’t book through Chase Travel is worse than no number.

Then taxes and fees go on. The rate a search engine shows is usually before tax in the United States and the Gulf, and after VAT but before city tax in most of Europe. Every price here is all-in: the base rate, plus the local percentage tax where one applies, plus any flat per-night city tax, plus the hotel’s own resort or destination fee if it charges one. There’s a separate guide on that arithmetic. The short version is that the number here is meant to be the number on the final bill, not the one on the billboard.

What gets ranked

For each hotel I hold roughly a year of nightly prices, refreshed on a rolling cycle, and find the cheapest consecutive stay in that window. The default is two nights, since that’s the booking minimum for The Edit and for Citi’s credit, with a Stay filter that re-scopes the whole view to one, three or four nights. Programs without a minimum (Amex FHR, Bilt HAFH, Chase Renowned, Capital One Premier, Leading Hotels) are shown per night. The grid sorts cheapest-first. Hotels I can’t price sort last rather than disappearing, so a missing number is visible as a missing number.

The window used to be about three months. It grew to a year over the summer of 2026 as the pipeline got faster, which is why the calendars now run so far ahead. A cheapest stay in the far future is real data, but it is also further from being booked, and rates a year out move more than rates a month out.

How much is covered

In the snapshot published on August 28, 2026 the catalogue held 10,727 program listings (a hotel in three programs counts three times) covering about 5,900 distinct properties, and 9,782 of those listings had a price, which is 91%. Coverage by list ran from about 93% on The Edit and Renowned down to 88% on Bilt’s HAFH and 90% on Capital One and Leading Hotels. The 9% without a price are hotels the meta-search doesn’t return rates for: some new, some that block resale channels, some sold out across the whole window.

Around one night in ten inside the window shows no rate even at a priced hotel, and that share doubles in December and January. Most of that is real: sold-out nights, and in Europe hotels that close for the season. Some of it is the search engine having nothing to show. The calendar draws those nights blank rather than guessing.

The deal badge

The green badge compares a hotel to itself, not to other hotels: when the cheapest stay sits at least 15% below that hotel’s own typical (median) price over the window, the card shows how far below, and 30% or more gets the strongest marking. A hotel needs at least three priced stays before I’ll call anything a deal, so thin data can’t fake one. A price I don’t trust, because its feed has gone stale or its fee constants haven’t been verified, gets no badge at all, whatever the arithmetic says.

That definition means a $2,000 suite at 40% under its usual price is a deal and a $150 room at its usual price isn’t, even though the room is cheaper. The cheapest-first sort is for finding cheap hotels. The badge is for finding a hotel on an unusually cheap date. They answer different questions and the site keeps them visually separate on purpose.

What can go wrong

Matching. The issuers publish their hotel lists with names and addresses; the search engine has its own listing for each hotel; joining the two is a fuzzy problem. “The Ritz-Carlton, Bal Harbour” and “Ritz Carlton Bal Harbour Miami” are the same hotel, and “Four Seasons Resort” and “Four Seasons Hotel” in the same city are not. Most matches are confident. A few hundred across the catalogue are not, and a low-confidence match can put a neighbour’s price on a hotel. If a price looks wrong for the hotel, that is the first thing I check, and it is the most useful thing to email me about.

Staleness. Prices refresh on a rolling cycle, so a rate can move between my snapshot and your click. The status line at the top of each collection page says when the data was published. Some sub-feeds refresh less often than others, and when one is behind, its hotels lose their deal badges until it catches up.

Parity. A meta-search minimum sometimes belongs to an online travel agency whose rate a card portal won’t match, even after the reseller filter. None of that changes with prettier engineering. It’s the nature of estimates, and I’d rather show the seams than pretend there aren’t any.

What isn’t happening

Hotels don’t pay for placement here. The ranking is arithmetic, cheapest first, and the site earns from clearly labelled ads, not from steering you anywhere. There are no affiliate links to the portals: Chase and Amex don’t pay referral commissions on hotel bookings, so the booking link is just the booking link.